While dungeons do seem to be alive, they also exhibit the behavior of a play or opera. This becomes more evident when it comes to the higher stake fights in the boss arenas. Veteran adventurers who have conquered a dungeon enough to set up a training school there have expressed this opinion often. ‘A boss will do three attacks with its fist and then sting with its tail before moving three steps to the left.’ This pattern has been called the mechanics of the boss fight. And there is always some sort of mechanic that the adventurer needs to overcome to emerge victoriously.
#Dimitri’s Perspective
It seemed like hours as the three combatants did their best to outmaneuver each other and get into a place where they could get in a decisive blow. Warnik hopped from island to island, trying to get the flame elemental into a pincer with Dimitri. The flame elemental kept retreating to always keep the two in the same arc.
The flame elemental easily switched between melee and ranged combat with ease. It was also very wary of Dimitri’s spells to separate it from the lava. Warnik was currently on the island with him fending off ranged attacks with his poleax. The fact that the poleax never left the forsaker barbarian’s hands showed just how worried Warnik was with losing his weapon.
“Warnik! There has to be something that is keeping this lava hot.”
“Yeah, I know. We aren’t in a volcano here. The islands also haven’t been melting, and are pretty solid. But I can still feel the heat from the lava. So I don’t think it’s magical, at least not the lava.”
“The heating element has to be though. Hey! I just remembered something.” The Warlock remembered one of his new skills.
“What’s that?”
“I picked up knowledge arcana. And I have concentration. Maybe I can use those to figure out where the heat generators are. Give me a few moments.”
He sat down in what he assumed was a meditative pose and thought hard about devices that could heat. Concentrating on the knowledge skill was like trying to find something on the internet without using a search engine, or trying to find something in a badly organized wiki.
The knowledge skill didn’t come with browser software. Instead, he got what he could only think of as hooks, or anchors when he thought about the knowledge. And these anchors helped to guide him to the next piece of knowledge.
With the skill only in the first tier, he couldn’t find out much, it was still better than what he knew before. Finally, he found something that could be helpful.
“Warnik, higher level spells or effects have a base cost, and a maintenance cost. The maintenance cost increases based on volume.”
“So cubic?”
“Yes. The base cost though is linear from the looks of it. It is based on tiers of spells.”
The forsaker batted away another fireball and then prepared to defend against another punch as the flame elemental came into melee range again. They had fallen into a pattern, something they should have been able to exploit, but so far the flame elemental has been able to adapt.
“So how does that help us, Dimitri?”
“If we can figure out the formula we can figure our how many generators are here and where they are. Since the mana cost to keep this room going must be fairly high. So more generators to keep the cost low.”
Warnik blocked the incoming punch and moved forward before the next punch and took a swing at the elemental’s torso. It withdrew again to start another fireball bombardment.
“It’s probably like a honeycomb. A hexagon is the most efficient way to set it up.” The barbarian said as he recovered some of his stamina. He didn’t seem to have a problem with going berserk in this fight, but it did look like he was exhausting himself trying to keep his emotions in check.
“I just thought of something. They can’t be beneath the islands, or else they’d melt, or more mana would have to be used to keep the islands stable. They have to be in the streams of lava.”
“So what can we do about it?”
Dimitri scanned through his spells again, looking at what he could do, and then slapped his palm against his forehead.
“What’s wrong?” His companion asked with concern, “Did we do something stupid?”
“I just realized I had another spell that I could have used. To keep from doing all this guesswork.
“I found them!” The mage cheered.
“So what? I still don’t know how we’ll destroy them.” The warrior called back to the mage, as he swung another homerun with the incoming fireball.
“It looks to be about two feet down. I can make a bridge to it with one of my spells. And then do you think you can destroy it with your ax?”
“I’m not sure I want to risk my ax cutting through lava. But we do have that sword we picked up in town for really close in fighting.”
The flame elemental wasn’t going to give them a chance to pull off the plan though. Warnik needed his poleax to fend off the fireballs and to use its range to strike at the elemental when it got close.
“We’re going to have to risk it if we want to do this Warnik.”
“Well let’s do this, you only live once!”
With his staff our the mage pointed towards the closest generator he could see with his
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
The lava did freeze and turn into rock, and then rock blocked the spell from reaching more lava. He cut the spell and did his best to recover.
“That didn’t work!” He yelled at Warnik. “The frozen lava got in the way of the spell.”
The flame elemental came forward again and smashed the newly solidified rock, shattering the partial bridge that they had. The poleax carried by the forsaker took the arm at the elbow, disrupting both the flame and the magic.
With a hiss of anger, the flaming monster withdrew again to reform its arm and launch some more fireballs at the duo.
“We will have to rush forward to keep the angle changing all the time. How long can you keep that spell up?”
Dimitri thought about it for a few moments, “Maybe ten seconds, and then I would need some time to recover.”
“How long? And how many generators are there?”
“I think around four to five minutes. And it looks like twelve or so generators.”
Warnik looked like he was thinking about a few things.
“That flame elemental destroyed the rock you had made. If we defend it, even if we don’t reach the generator we should be closer on the next attempt.”
“Ok, let’s do this Warnik.
The Warlock was a step behind and a step to the left of the warrior, using him as a shield and to keep the line going. The movement was slow as he had to keep the spell going while trusting Warnik to keep the elemental’s attacks at bay. Fully on the defensive, the forsaker had to ignore obvious openings for attacking. It took them eight tenth’s of his mana before the cold spell couldn’t freeze anymore of the lava.
“I guess that’s it, Dimitri,” Warnik said and took the haft of his weapon in both hands just below the ax head and thrust down with the spike at the end to the center of where the cold couldn’t reach.
The mage saw the aura of the generator snuff out as the spike went through it. Warnik felt the change and quickly pulled the haft of his weapon out of the lava, smoking but otherwise undamaged. The tall man quickly turned and picked up Dimitri with one arm and jumped to the nearest island.
The mage was dropped and Warnik let out a bellow and charged towards the elemental again, taking a few swings with his poleax. By the time the forsaker was able to calm his emotions, the lava had already started to darken and solidify again.
#Warnik’s Perspective
He was breathing heavily as he recovered from the assault on the first generator. The heat in the area was getting to him, he was still sweating, but he was starting to feel nauseous and cramping in his muscles.
The violent emotions inside of him were a raging torrent, and he still needed a lot of effort to suppress them. He had noticed that every time he didn’t do something impulsive or using a more blunt term, stupid, that the emotions would increase.
The assault on the generator was a measured action, that had to be coordinated with his companion. Every step he took forward to allow the warlock to keep up caused a flare of anger to well up inside of him. He was a big guy on Earth and he had been told he was intimidating, especially to coworkers. He had to learn to repress his anger to keep from being reported to HR.
That may have been a mistake, as the emotions here were much more violent than he was used to dealing with, and every time he bottled up the rage it felt like he was trying to contain an explosion. Which was probably closer to reality than it was a metaphor.
He knew that he had to do something stupid, something impulsive to get everything under control. When he was sure that Dimitri was safe he let go of his control of the furnace inside his soul and charged at the flame elemental.
He felt foam at his lips, hoping it was a sign of the berserker getting out and not the next stage of heat exhaustion or worse heat stroke. With every swing of his poleax and every jump he did to engage the flame, he felt the emotions start to calm.
He was pushing the elemental back, but it could also be that the elemental was drawing him further away from Dimitri. He couldn’t help himself at the moment, and while the emotions were calming, his anger at not being able to control them was fueling them as well.
Finally, after what seemed like long minutes, he was able to get some sort of control over the rage in his heart. The flame elemental had been pushed to the back wall away from Dimitri. The emotionally-recovered warrior quickly turned and withdrew towards the warlock again.
“How’s your mana doing?”
“I’m back to about twenty-five percent. I’m keeping my displacement active, so it’s eating into how much I can recover.”
“I need something to drink Dimitri. My mouth is going dry, and I feel nausea rising in my stomach.”
“I don’t know if that flame elemental will let you do that.”
“You’re going to have to cover me. We do not want this to turn into heatstroke.” He used his hand to whip the sweat from his forehead, shedding it to keep it out of his eyes. The beard he wore did a good job of catching the liquid from his face but did nothing to keep it out of his eyes. The helmet he wore was tight, and that helped with the sweat, but not with the cooling he needed.
Dimitri shot a few
He put the waterskin away and then picked up his poleax again, “Ok ready for round two. Or at least the preliminaries.” He moved in front of the warlock, to allow Dimitri to recover his mana fully. He felt the emotions start to rise inside of him again as he stayed on the defensive.
“I had a thought, Dimitri.”
“What’s that?”
“Ever heard of Qix?”
“No, I haven’t.”
Warnik couldn’t help but laugh, “I guess I’m dating myself again. Not that I need to worry about that. Qix was an old arcade game that was ported to Linux a while ago.” He batted back another fireball with the head of his ax, keeping the elemental at range for the moment.
“Qix was a game, where you had to trap a bouncy ball in a field by drawing rectangles, slowly shrinking down the area it could inhabit. Think of our friendly elemental as the bouncy ball. One of the tactics you could use in Qix was to cut the area in half, and so forth to make the inhabitable area smaller and smaller.”
“Oh… And we haven’t seen the elemental jump from pool to pool, it always dives under the surface of the lava and appeared somewhere else.” Dimitri caught onto the suggestion he was trying to give him.
“Right, so let’s go straight down the middle of the room, to the next generator.”
“Sounds aggressive, I like it.” The mage turned and pointed towards the lava towards the center of the room. “That will be our next target I think.”
Warnik nodded his head and looked at the fire elemental, it was just about time for it to come in for a melee attack. There was a pattern here they could follow, and the more experienced they got with it the better they were at predicting the movements of the elemental. Not enough to attack it directly but enough to keep themselves in the fight.
“OK, ready.”
“Umm Dimitri, this time I’m going to call cadence, step on each number it’ll keep us moving and having to second guess each other. It should get us there faster. Cast on ‘one’, start moving on two.”
“Worth a shot.”
“OK, onna one…” He waited till he saw the jet of white mist emerge from the tip of the staff and strike the lave. “Two…” The first step forward, he watched as Dimitri took the step. “Three… Four… One… Two… Three… Four.” He kept the cadence going as he swatted at the fists of the elemental as it tried to smash them. Every time he called a number he took a step with the mage stepping behind him.
The next generator was close and the elemental took a swipe at them with both fists. Warnik quickly stepped forward and swung his ax as far out as he could to strike at the fists, catching one and taking the other full in the torso. He still felt the impact but not the heat from the fire, at least not directly.
He heard Dimitri cast another spell behind him, “
He felt the impact as the flame elemental smashed down on them again, launching him into the air to go sliding against the ground towards the back wall, he heard something snap and the sharp feel of pain go through his body as he moved to recover.