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The Gamer Chapter 1389 – Raid Sweeping
🕑 Added 2023-02-17 15:14:07 +0000 UTCA swing of the baton brought forth ethereal flutes. “Warm-up, everyone!” the Conductor spoke in a theatrical tone. Like darts, the flutes pointed outwards.
Everyone’s video game instincts were sharpened both by how they spent their free time and previous Raids. They ran out of the path of the flutes just as a wave of sonic energy blasted out alongside the wonderful melody that rang out from the ghostly instruments.
Another swing of the baton, and the flutes flew away, scattered around the room to be replaced by a swarm of violins. As the bows drew over the strings, sickles of damaging volume curved through the room like a terrible mandala. The unorthodox shape of the attack caught some of the party off guard. John himself barely managed to dodge with Magus Step. His Creator Puppet was not as lucky.
The Swirls Model stood in the stream of magically enhanced sound. Manifested notes scratched over the surface, adding thin lines to the smooth texture of the multi-coloured golem. Until John manoeuvred his third body out of the attack by simply walking out. Neither the shoving nor the cutting force had been enough to truly leave any mark on the mace-wielding puppet.
John allowed himself a quick impressed whistle. Even over-levelled, taking a Raid Boss attack head on like that and only having a few scratches to show for it was a splendid result. Necessary as well. The defences of the Creator Puppet needed to be immense; unlike all other participants it could not be healed.
The Conductor continued to swing his baton, summoning more instruments. A circle of drums was third, sending several shockwaves through the floor that had to be carefully navigated by rhythmically skipping over them as they spread out towards the walls. Then, a gong followed, taking the same principle but only summoning one mighty shockwave that travelled forwards and then bounced back off the walls. Another surprise that caught a few people off guard and may have led to the first few early deaths, had they not been ahead of the curve.
Trumpets came in fifth, creating swift and short-lived cones that only left a few areas near the stage that were safe to stand at. Sixth and last were pianos, whose delightful melodies made rectangular energy bars fall from the sky. They slowly disappeared against the floor, on impact. Location and length of the rectangles depended on pitch and length of the note.
“Wonderful, wonderful,” the Conductor raised both hands, announcing the end of the introductory sequence. “And now – let’s show them beauty!”
The instruments hovering all around reacted to the waving motions of the conductor, all activating. Sombre and calm, the song started, bringing down flutes and the pianos. The instruments would linger in an area for three seconds, before unleashing their effects. It was an exceedingly fair mechanic, easy in terms of timing but complex due to changing locations and different typing.
Much like the Pop Queen before, the Conductor was stationary. It made it exceptionally easy to pump damage into him. Eventually, there was a second phase, during which choir singers joined the symphony. They spawned on the circling vinyl and would heal the boss for as long as they were present. Killing them was tricky due to overlapping area of effect attacks and the obstacle of the tonearm. A damaging aura was around the unmoving environmental hazard, blasting everyone back who touched it. The singers could pass through without any issue, however.
Aside from the first few ones, the singers were easily dealt with. They had good group coordination and the fact that their best single target damage dealer, Sylph, got to fly and ignore the annoyance of the spinning disk made that part almost trivial. As a matter of fact, the entire fight got a bit trivial. This was, in large part, due to it being on a timer. Boss fights that were on a timer were typically more DPS checks than anything else and being overlevelled allowed them to get away even with the messy execution.
And so it was that they killed the Conductor on the first try.
The Conductor was wildly swinging his arms around, ramping up the number and speed of the instrumental assaults as the fight reached its climax. Above his head hovered a black, red-outlined object of menacing energy. Like a nail, it looked, and like a nail it was driven down.
It pierced through the Conductor, causing his body to seize up and the orchestra to suddenly stop. The carefully coordinated symphony came to an abrupt halt. The white rolls of the powdered wig opened as the Conductor took a stumbling step off the point at the centre of the vinyl. “How… uncivilized…” he gasped, before collapsing into nothing.
‘8 minutes investment for a level is pretty solid,’ John thought. ‘That puts me at 546.’
The vinyl slowly stopped spinning, then faded from existence altogether. The tonearm raised back up into the wall, pushing out a wooden chest of smooth make in the process. It would have looked like a fantastic piece of lacquered furniture, had it not been for the fact that the lid had a giant powdered wig. That immediately gave it an exceedingly stupid appearance.
A swarm of bats and wolves coalesced into a mass of red and black energy next to John. One after another, Claire’s limbs peeled out of the darkness, until the vampire maid had manifested fully again. During the encounter, she had used her ability to dis- and reassemble to dodge most of the attacks. It would have been great if they could have abused her ability to get several dozen eyes in the sky, all connected to the mental network. Sadly, intel had to be communicated from familiar to vampire even at this proximity.
That being said, Claire had contributed a whole lot with just one Skill. “Good use of the Death Nail,” John told her.
“It’s not exactly difficult to use,” the vampire maid stated with a smile. “Even an idiot like me can do it.”
“It’s a simple Skill, but don’t put yourself down,” John chided her. The Death Nail was an absolutely absurd Skill in the Raid environment. It placed a debuff on the target that did nothing initially. Within 10 minutes, Claire could activate it to deal a percentage of all damage the target sustained while the Death Nail was on it. The two drawbacks to the attack were that it cost 200% of Max Mana (which was only possible to reach by giving Claire time to drink a sizable amount of powerful blood) and that there was a tiny moment in time during which an enemy could escape.
The description of the Skill said the Death Nail was anchored above the target’s head and that it descended on activation. With no word did it say that damage was inescapable. They had run the experiment with Sylph a couple of times and, given warning or good intuition, the volt bunny had managed to zap out of the way. On a real opponent, distracting them before triggering the damage would be vital.
On Raid Bosses, it was an execution button that made everything easier.
“Anyway, let’s check out the Loot,” John directed everyone towards the chest. He pulled out four instruments, each of Common rarity, each enchanted in various ways. The flute, trumpet, and gong he had no use for (and the gong also was a handful to handle). The Violin of Grace Siena expectedly laid a claim to. It was a wonderfully worked piece of wood and string and she was fiddling away at it while talking to Undine about the sound.
In the Uncommon category, John got two ingots of the Soundforged Mithril and one batch of Symphonic Wood planks. The metal differentiated from regular Mithril by having additional compatibility with sound-based enchantments, as the name would have led to guess. The Symphonic Wood made for similar advantages. Neither were therefore useful for John. He would add it to the generally available crafting resources and then let the ministry deal with its distribution.
He got no Rare drops which was a… rare occurrence, but not at all one that could never occur.
In the Epic category he won the lottery, getting a Tempi ingot. The incredibly rare, incredibly light Celexium lay in his hand. When he tossed the bar up into the air, it came back down slowly, as if it was underwater. Bright green, it was the same colour as Sylph’s hair. “This alone makes the whole Raid worth it,” he stated and grabbed the ingot mid-air, when it had drifted back down to his level.
“Whatcha doing with it?” Rave asked.
“Boring as it is, I’ll probably give it to Magnus,” the Gamer reported, as he stashed it away. “I’d love to get another Fusional weapon or check what Hailey or Delicia could do with it, but all of that will probably only benefit us. If we figure out stable, unmanned Mobile Barriers that’s a boon to the entire infrastructure.”
“It’s going to be such a headache when that news hits the public.” Momo was rubbing her temples, as if she was already suffering said ailment. “Urgh, the complaints from the Fateweavers, I can already hear them. ‘You’re making our work irrelevant!’ they’ll cry. And then all the foreign dignitaries wanting access to the technology.”
“To be fair to the Fateweavers, they’ll be partly right,” John said and shrugged. “But you can’t halt the march of progress. Technology produces convenience. Convenience rationalizes away certain jobs. Such is the progress of time. Not like they’ll be without anything to do just because we aren’t entirely reliant for Mobile Barriers on them anymore. If we even get to a stage where it is cheaper to use these unmanned engines than it is to hire a Fatewever instead.”
Requiring Celexiums for the research alone made the technology so far from financially viable it wasn’t even funny. This was the kind of ludicrously expensive undertaking that Scarlett’s insistence the free market could provide everything was tested to its core. What capitalist would invest in this venture? Only one that had reason to believe there was promise there, which was why John and his state-funded development had to lay some groundwork.
‘Actually, I wonder what she would respond with to that assertion,’ the Gamer thought.
“Yo, tiger, stop thinking about Scarlett and look at this.” Rave pulled him back to reality by waving the last item that had been in the box at his face.
It was a fascinating mixture of metal, lace and silk that only magic could make work in its entirety. The metal parts were a circle of silver and gold, artfully forged to create patterns of swirling leaves over the narrow surface. The inside was lined, looked nice and soft to the touch. As did the flexible fabric that dangled from the ring, attached on one end to the ring itself and the other to a highly stylized lock.
It was a chastity belt.
“A Legendary chastity belt,” John said and took it from Rave. “Now I’ve seen it all.” After a brief moment of hesitation. “Well, I haven’t seen anyone wear it.”
“That’s the spirit.”
“You want to put it on then?” John asked with a knowing smile.
Laden with sarcasm, Rave responded, “Yeah, totally. Ya know how much of a pure sub I am, Master.”
“You can enjoy the part well enough.”
“Sure, can be nice sometimes, but I ain’t letting ya block access to my pussy, tiger, I need that bit to sit on faces.”
“Hey!” the voice of Steve temporarily pulled them out of their thoughts. “You want to summon the next boss?”
John considered it. Since they had nuked this one so swiftly, it stood to reason that the others would follow the same example. If he could get all of the other bosses done in an afternoon, why wouldn’t he? “Yeah, sure, just give us a second to decide which one,” he told the shopkeeper and put the chastity belt away. He would decide what to do with it later.
Over the course of the next two hours, they cleaned house with the other three genre bosses. It was a bit disappointing to just nuke them all like this, but they all shared the time-gated gimmick and therefore were all trivialized by outperforming the expected damage.
They started with the metal boss. His signature was that the mannequin form was black, with heavy muscles and long, flowing hair. He constantly headbanged, at least to some degree.
The mechanics of the fight were focused around four rotating phases. The boss was either a lead singer, guitarist, drummer, or bassist. When he was a singer, he threw out ranged attacks that simultaneously blew back melee assailants, so Metra was quite pissed during that phase. As a guitarist, he also did ranged attacks, but summoned Crowds instead of blowing back the party members. The Crowds just stood around, serving as area blockage, until he hit the drummer phase. During this, the boss would engage in wild and fast melee attacks, while the Crowds threw Crowdsurfers at members of the party. Even if they missed, the Crowdsurfers would chase party members around until they were either killed or made to collide with the boss, causing him to take bonus damage for a limited time. When the boss was a bassist, the Crowds all left and the boss went into an enrage, hitting much harder.
During all of that, he was also supported by Roadies. They were incredibly tanky adds, who only grappled and tried to set up good hits for the boss. Doubly dangerous when there were Crowdsurfers around. Nailing the interplay of these mechanics cost them two tries. Halfway through the encounter, the boss ignited his weapons with the fires of passion, granting him additional damage – except versus Aclysia, whose Fire Immunity came in handy.
Then, during the last stretch, the boss split into all four of his aspects. The sheer amount of damage during that phase was initially difficult to handle. Three more tries and they had that down too, killing the metal boss of the Music Library.
The jazz boss was way less mechanical. Matter of fact, he couldn’t have really qualified as a traditional Raid Boss. There was no throughline to his mechanics or move set, except that he was reaction based. He used a great repertoire of saxophone and piano based attacks, all of which were improvised. It made it less about learning the move set and more about coaxing desired reactions out of the boss. It was enjoyable, if unorthodox, and took them seven tries despite the level difference.
Lastly, the techno boss was one with the specific design philosophy of limited damage windows. He was located at the heart of a shielded DJ platform atop six subwoofers. The woobs and dubs caused soundwave attacks that travelled all over the stage. It was all about dodging the attacks until there was a break between songs and then pumping all possible damage into the boss.
They were not quite so over-levelled that they could skip the final song and the mostly movement-based difficulty of the fight meant they probably could have done this while under-levelled too. In any case, it took them four tries to get everything right and then they were done with all of that.
“No good loot,” John grumbled, rummaging through the last of the chests. There were a bunch of resources and novelty items that were good for fancy party tricks, but nothing he was really excited about. At least he was another 2 levels higher. Definitely a good investment of 2 hours.
“If you want the good loot at the back, you’ll have to go through me,” Steve warned and opened up the counter. Then he just stood there, like NPCs ready to get attacked always did.
“Not today,” John decided and left the Raid.
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