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The Gamer Chapter 1080 – Final Grind of the Year 10 – Scouting Assaults
🕑 Added 2021-10-01 16:32:49 +0000 UTCJohn was happy to have an additional eye in the sky. Regularly independent, Momo was closely linked to his thoughts as he used both her and the Mandala Sphere to oversee the scene below them. Three dozen rat-like creatures, formed out of garbage and the rotting remains of food, were trying to scale the walls of their impromptu fortress tower. Each was the size of a pony, which made them impressive but not threatening when compared to what else the group was used to seeing.
More than their appearance, their tendency to not die was the issue.
Aclysia charged at one of them, continuing her steady patrol around the base of the tower, and effortlessly cleaved apart the body made from garbage. The two halves fell down. Already knowing what would happen next, the weaponized maid kept slicing at the pieces. With one half, she was lucky, striking whatever piece of garbage kept the rat operating. The other, what had been the lower half of the enemy she had struck, formed into a new rat which quickly scurried over to one of its fellow swarmlings, leaving the other pieces of itself behind. Once the two touched, the smaller was absorbed into the larger, forming a bigger trash rodent.
Similar scenes repeated all around the tower. Gnome, Aclysia and Beatrice were at the front line, as per usual, circling around and gradually killing the rats. It was a slow and arduous task. Each rat could split into two to ten smaller rats, depending on how many cores were inside the original monster. How to spot this in advance, they had not yet found out.
Beyond their three frontliners, Salamander and Sylph were also out and about, reducing the number of rats that flowed out from the dirty, badly kept city that surrounded them. Their magical attacks were super effective against these types of enemies. Sylph was particularly good at killing the rats outright. While fire was generally the better way to remove garbage, Salamander needed several seconds of concentrated attacks to either incinerate an enemy in its entirety or conjure a meteor strong enough to blast them into smithereens too small to recover into new rats. Sylph conjured a lightning strike and that fried the rats inside to outside. Mana and aiming were her limited factors and she could be assisted with both.
Provided that she played along.
John could send Sylph new mana without issue. Administrating Momo’s buffs was a different matter. They had discovered that the Fireflies moved at a speed about 25% faster than Momo’s own top flying speed, which scaled with her Intellect. Roughly speaking, it seemed that ten points of Intellect increased her flying speed by about as much as five points of Sylph’s Agility.
This meant that Sylph with over about 2500 Agility (all buffs considered), could never ever be caught by Momo’s Intellect 1000 (again, all buffs considered) Fireflies, unless she slowed down immensely. That was not practical in the middle of combat. She wasn’t the only one with that issue either.
Beatrice and Siena were bound to the ground and not quite as fast, but they were impressive in their own mobility regardless. Even Salamander could outpace the Fireflies. If they had been involved, several other harem members would have also had an issue. A solution had to be found.
What they had come up with fairly quickly was a ‘minigame’. A lot of flying games had a mechanic where one had to pick up items along the track to gather speed or benefit from other bonuses. Typically, this came in the form of rings or energy bubbles. Even if Fireflies were smaller targets, the idea was the same. Momo would scatter them about the battlefield in positions optimal for people to pick up as they moved between targets. Those would then provide the six second buff for everyone to move to their next destination.
‘The strategy would be even better if Momo could use the Fireflies for information gathering,’ John thought. The little bugs were tools to buff allies or deal damage. They had a resemblance of sentience, allowing them to execute the tasks they were given. With their senses, they could do some improvising, like dodging, but they had no mechanic allowing them to send back intel to their conjurer.
That would have been asking for a lot though.
As it stood, the Fireflies were an occasional bonus for those out in the field, moving too much to reliably be reached by the buffs manually flying towards them. That only covered the red and white Fireflies, buffing Physical Stats or creating/reinforcing barriers. Black, those that dealt damage, and green Fireflies, buffing Social Stats, were delegated exclusively to hitting enemies with whatever little damage they could deal. It wasn’t a lot, but every bit counted and it was essentially free anyway.
As for the blue ones, those were sent down into the tower, where John was hanging out with Siena and Undine. They regularly buffed his Mental Stats by 15% for 6 seconds at a time, increasing his mana regeneration. Momo spawned a free Firefly with one of the five colours every 12 seconds, so she had to ration them somewhat, but the constant buffs were still a great help all around. As unremarkable as her presence seemed, lacking flashy spells or aggressive combat behaviour, Momo still provided a greatly appreciated service to the team.
‘Three services, actually,’ John reminded himself, while observing Sylph’s endeavours.
The arcvolt elemental flew like a thunderstrike, arcing and jagging as a light blue streak. When she flew a tad too close to one of the abandoned buildings that were scattered between the badly kept ones, a secondary enemy leapt out of one of the shattered windows. It whistled as it flew at an absurd speed, itself a smear of grey, until it hit Sylph.
What regularly would have grievously wounded the glass canon of the group only stopped her momentum. Any damage she would have sustained was stopped at the sacrifice of a white layer on her skin that flickered and dissolved.
The Fireflies were useful, immensely so, but the White Spells Momo brought to the table, her defensive spells, were something that John appreciated even more: reliable. Both White Barrier and Directional Defence were instantly cast, lasted for an hour, had a range of one kilometre, and blocked a fair amount of damage. They didn’t matter that much when they were put on Aclysia or Gnome, as they had their own defensive and/or regenerative capabilities. For someone like Sylph, a shield was the difference between life or death, however.
While dashing backwards, the arcvolt elemental raised her hand. The living projectile that had come for her was in freefall, a shivering mass of goop that pulsed like a slug on its way down. A bolt of lightning illuminated the midnight darkness, coming down from heaven and landing in Sylph’s hand. It formed a lance. Like a cuter and no less horny version of Zeus, the air spirit tossed the lightning bolt at her opponent and evaporated it in an explosion of yellow and blue electricity.
‘You’re the best Mo-Mo-No-No!’ The mental babbling came from Sylph just as her shield was refreshed. A layer of white closed around her and then dimmed to a barely visible outline.
‘Save me the nicknames and the mana!’ the sassy support chastised. ‘You’re too fast to get hit, so learn to be careful or reviving you will be more efficient than protecting you!’
‘Roger, roger!’ the air spirit gave a carefree answer and dashed towards the position Momo quickly shared. A red Firefly there boosted Sylph on her path back to the main battlefield. While that was going on, Momo turned her attention to directing Salamander. Inside the bunker, John was sending steady updates to Aclysia, Beatrice and Gnome.
That was the third new essential service Momo provided to the group: being an additional backline coordinator. While John’s mental abilities had kept up with the demands of their sizable combat group, it was undeniable that having a second person to closely manage a section of the party raised efficiency. While the Gamer remained in overall command, Momo dedicated herself to all of the little things only pertaining to a select few of them. Typically, she would coordinate the flying members of their party. This freed up mental capacity to do some more advanced planning on the ground level.
If push came to shove, Momo had the capacity to deal damage as well. Looking at their group composition, that would have been a waste of mana, however.
Aside from further optimizing their new strategies and communications, the Assault was fairly uneventful. The boss monster turned out to be a Trash-Ratzilla, formed from a bunch of garbage rodents that had scurried away during the constant storm of monsters. It was essentially a bigger version of the regular enemies, slowly falling apart into smaller adds. At the end of the Assault, John got the regular pop-up.
“One hour and it gets me like 4% of the level and that’s with the Christmas buff,” John hummed and shook his head. He shouldn’t be surprised, Assaults got exponentially more valuable and an hour was the bare minimum of what was required for it to be effective. Which was why John had used it as his unit of measurement. He scratched his chin and glanced over to his current level. “The EXP bar is practically empty and I’m at 384… even with sex and the other five Assaults, there is no way we will make it to 386 today.”
“Maybe that’s… good?” Gnome carefully suggested. “If we’re in there for several days, I would rather be in an easier version… you know, just to be safe and not lose everything… that’s the prudent decision.”
“That’s so boring though, no-panties!” Salamander cried out.
“No, she does have a point,” Momo retorted.
“Yeah, she does,” John agreed. The way Create Instant Dungeon worked, the Assaults (and most other types of I.D.s) came in difficulty brackets of five levels. The current difficulty bracket was therefore level 381 to 385. Getting one further up would give a little more EXP per enemy, which would probably cascade into one or two levels once he was done with it all. However, if he died at any point during the Assault, ALL of the experience would be lost, so being safe with something as brazen as this was wise.
“Us killing the enemies faster might make up for the difference,” Undine suggested.
“Could be,” John admitted, if only because that made it easier for him to go along with this. “Alright, second Assault: Ferals.”
The enemies in the Ferals Instant Dungeon were monstrous peacocks and incredibly small cats attacking with sonic magic. It was a very odd combination. That wasn’t something John had a lot of time to ponder, while the giant bird pecked away at the solid stone walls with metal-reinforced beaks. At the same time, the magic of the cats bounced in through whatever openings their fortification had and dealt steady, if minor, damage to John.
They could deal with both by abandoning their regular turtling and assuming a more nomadic strategy. Getting encircled by the cats, too small and slippery to be eliminated at the necessary speed, was the greatest issue. Continuously moving through the foliage and sometimes dealing with the boss monster, a horse-sized duck, was their biggest issue.
‘A little bit better,’ John thought, before they went on to the third category: Forest Elementals.
Here they found themselves in a truly unusual setting. They were on top of some kind of giant mushroom, with several more around them, attached to the inside of what appeared to be a hollow tree trunk several kilometres across. The floor was soft, which made it difficult to run. A further issue was that the mushroom let out an explosion of paralysing spores when it was cut deep enough. Only the Artificial Spirits were immune to the effects.
The lack of earth made their usual strategy more difficult, albeit not impossible. Fending off the enemies, spiders with blade-like legs, was initially difficult but gradually became easier. They were adapted to move on the soft mushrooms, cutting the membrane open and causing irregular spore discharges as they kept swarming the party. Stone, however, they could not climb quickly. Once the fortress had been erected, they were incredibly safe. The only issue was that the area around their fortress became so saturated with steadily leaking spores from all the gashes in the fungal matter that nobody but Aclysia and Beatrice could move outside Sylph’s air filtration. The spores were also quite resilient to fire, which made attempts by Salamander to remove them only minorly effective.
Then the boss monster spawned. It was a particularly enormous variety, a red-furred gorilla-esque creature with a neckless head that consisted of a giant, sharp-toothed maw and two small eyes. The good thing about its arrival was that it sucked away all of the spores. The bad news was that it got buffed from that, showcased by a hard shell of mycelium covering its body, so they had to deal with an incredibly powerful mushroom ape. Once it was defeated the mushroom all around healed, stopping the leaking of spores and allowing the consistently continuing arachnids to set off some new explosions.
It also allowed the group to expand the fortress grounds somewhat, covering more of the mushroom with a layer of stone.
‘Bad performance, but this one is also more complicated,’ John noted. A lunch break later, they were back for the fourth Assault: Ogres.
The environment for the Ogres Assault was notable for its heat. They were spawned in some kind of dry steppe, comparable to the American west. That included a variety of magical tumbleweed. Ogre mages, two-metres tall and arms thicker than most people’s waists, used air magic to send those weeds flying towards the party. Once they collided with a living target, they exploded into a random element.
New tumbleweeds spawned at the point of origin minutes after they had been thrown. In the interim, the ogre mages sent waves of thralls at the group. Each was incredibly weak, but there were a lot of them. No boss ever spawned, but the mages apparently fulfilled the same role.
Funnily enough, the tumbleweeds became the group’s best asset. Because they only exploded on contact with living matter, including anything that was magically animated, they could be contained in ditches. Surrounding the fortification with a ring of exploding tumbleweed protected them against the thralls. Towards the end of the test wave, the design had gotten sophisticated enough that Gnome could raise specific segments, filled to the brim with tumbleweeds, up and send them downhill. Gravity didn’t outclass the ogre’s magic, but a dedicated effort by Sylph certainly did. Consequently, they could obliterate a segment of mages at one point.
‘I guess it makes sense the thralls would give less experience,’ John gave his verdict for that dungeon. ‘Pretty good regardless.’
Second to last were the Orcs.
That one was refreshingly simple: a massive army of well-equipped orcs in mean-looking armour charged at their fortress across a black landscape that might as well have been Mordor. Every now and again, a warlord spawned, increasing coordination among the orcs. If the boss monster was left to live, the horde would eventually find a weakness in the party’s defences and exploit it. Because of this, they had to occasionally lead an offensive out of their fortifications, kill the warlord in the back row, and retreat. Simple, messy, and very dangerous.
‘Fun as it is, this one is definitely the hardest,’ John told himself and they went to the last one in their selection.
The Undead Assault was quite interesting. The group’s main enemies were clacking constructs of various bones, tied together into humanoid shapes by rune-covered cloth. Unlike regular Instant Dungeon encounters, the remains did not despawn when the monster was killed. The boss monster that finally appeared was an undead gryphon that put itself together from the bones.
While they were nimble, they could not take a lot of damage. What made them truly notable was that the first one reassembled itself when the second one spawned. Then those two spawned for the third and so on. The steady increase was worrying, but it also increased the number of boss monsters they killed in that pale blue, sick plain.
‘Time to get the maximum EXP out of Experience of Love and then make a decision.’`
A long, long orgy was thankfully worth the delay.
Comments
Alexius Matsi
My guess either the Forest Elementals or the Orges, since both get somewhat easier over time with the developing Fortress Strategy and improved counter measures.
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