Chapter 634 – Gamer grinds again 5 – Time to Raid

Chapter 634 – Gamer grinds again 5 – Time to Raid

It had been a long time since John had first opened the Raid. ‘A lot of things I recently did I last did a long time ago,’ the Gamer realized. Not surprising in any way. Before them was a mountain, rising over the border of a murky swamp. Its front had a massive stone formation, partially natural, partly shaped, that depicted the skull of a toothed dragon.

The swamp itself was filled with exactly nothing. John didn’t even know how far it stretched. It was a fair assumption that much of it was useless scenery. Not like that knowledge would do him any good. ‘No, wait... why wouldn’t that do me any good?’ he asked himself. ‘Instant Dungeons are game-like not carbon copies of every single last game mechanic. There is no reason to assume the enemies are tethered to their spawn points. Even if they are, they probably won’t regenerate instantly when running back.’

John hadn’t too often tried to kite bosses outside of their boss rooms, if they even had any. There just never had been a reason to try or it had been simply impossible. A lot of bosses had a tendency to be a lot bigger than the doors that led to them. Or the arenas were sealed off in some fashion.

There was a saying John had heard from a raid leader in World of Warcraft once: “Everything that can be kited will be kited.” A good and proper stance to have, particularly in the game where there were guaranteed threat mechanics and spells were usually cast on target. In the world of reality, kiting actually presented numerous issues.

For a start, real world enemies were rarely stupid enough to tunnel vision on one enemy. That much was obvious. The further complications actually came when kiting was successful. Hitting a running enemy sounded pretty easy, but speed tended to be inconsistent, depending on obstacles. Should Salamander, for example, decide to throw a massive fireball, it could hit, best outcome, miss, a waste of mana, or she could even aim too far ahead of the enemies path and hit the person kiting. That was just one person throwing a spell. Melee was even more difficult, especially if the target and the kiting person were among the fastest in the raid.

So kiting as it was known from video games wasn’t quite realistic in most real-world scenarios. However, there were parts of it that were easily copyable. First, luring the enemy into a position more advantageous for the chased party. Secondly, hit and run left even real enemies confused and often unable to respond properly.

John had rarely employed these tactics in the past because they were straight-up unnecessary. Bosses he fought were designed to be killable. As long as he didn’t underestimate them, stayed cautious and planned for their abilities, playing within the frame of the boss arena had been perfectly functionable. The biggest drawback to kiting, regardless of video games or reality, was that it took longer to kill an opponent by letting them chase you around for a while. John usually valued his time over his security.

With these enemies, that was a bit of a different story. He could easily recall the one they had met. A Dragonkin, a four-legged creature not unlike a centaur in body-structure, but less influenced by a human and more of a proper dragon. Just the shape of the torso had really reminded him of a man, the head had been clearly reptilian.

The first time around, it had established its dominance quite clearly, taking one medium wound while treating both Gnome and Aclysia like bowling pins. What had ultimately gotten John to retreat was the threat of a second one coming their way.

That thing was immensely tall, thick and likely quite heavy. Perhaps fighting it in the swamp wouldn’t be the worst idea. Especially if John could lay some groundwork first. It would limit its mobility worse than theirs, hopefully, while reducing the risk of a second one noticing the commotion. The additional enemy may notice that its comrade was missing, however.

‘Alright, information gathering time,’ he thought and sent out the elementals. First order of action was to find out the size of the actual swamp. The answer measured it at quite small. A mere one-hundred by one-hundred metres, with the ceiling of the Illusion Barrier being lower than the mountain peaks. Not a whole lot of area to play around with when fighting an enemy with about ten metres of reach with his weapon (John just assumed that first Dragonkin to be the same and male).

Anyway, there was no way to get above the actual insides of the dungeon, so that was interesting. John may have collapsed the mountain on top of all inside enemies if he thought that was an option. However, he had his doubts that such a magic manoeuvre would go without Gaia immediately patching the thing. More than likely, she had already wizened up to the Gamer pulling stunts like that. Even if she hadn’t put some protection in place, John doubted a few tons of mountain rubble were enough to kill the Dragonkin and the so-far unseen dragon. Worst case, they would permanently have angered every single enemy inside, while levelling the field, causing them to all attack as one whenever they entered the Raid.

Which would have made it unclearable until they out levelled it by a significant margin.

Definitely not worth the risk. Especially since the dungeon limitations meant that he had to be inside (or Gnome had to be, rather) to do it effectively. ‘Although it’s worth an analysis whether changes we make to the dungeon even persist,’ John thought. Even if they tore down the mountain, it might be that it was simply restored once he came back.

So, that was the second order of information gathering. John had Gnome uproot one of the mangroves standing around. Then he had her create a stone platform to stand on firmly in the up and down wavy wetness of the swamp. Lastly, he had her create a large hole, which quickly filled with water. Additionally to all this, he used Combination between Gnome and Undine to create Nadine.

She was one of his most used Combinations, even though she was only moderately useful in combat scenarios. A girl of a retracted personality and a beauty that could be expected when combining two already gorgeous women into one, the green-haired plant elemental was mainly servicing him when it came to creating gardens and the like. When fighting, her main strength was restriction.

He only needed her for a little thing, namely growing some trees that weren’t native to the area. To that end, he always carried a glass full of apple seeds in his inventory. The intent between these changes was to see if things got fixed and, if yes, what did. The uprooted tree was damage to the landscape, the plateau and hole different kinds of landscape manipulations and the apple trees were for introducing entirely new things into the barrier.

They exited, John counted down from ten, and then went back in. The uprooted mangrove was still uprooted, the plateau and the hole were both still there, but the apple trees were gone. ‘So I can manipulate the landscape that is already here, but new things introduced won’t stick around,’ the Gamer analysed. That knowledge wasn’t immediately useful, but more information was always better than less. It also confirmed that, if he were to blow up the mountain, it would stay blown up. ‘Now, to use all of that to my advantage.’

First off, they had to modify the swamp. Right now, it was all nice and swampy, with murky water and soft, yielding mud underneath. The depth was wildly inconsistent, as Undine scouted out for him. It was something that he couldn’t discern with the naked eye. At some points, the water went up to three metres deep, apparently. While many or most of these things were of greatest disadvantage to the Dragonkin, it wasn’t like John or his elementals couldn’t be hindered by these things.

He could start working on that pretty soon, since he still had a load of Stat points for them to distribute in theory. They were still several levels behind him, but the Gamer didn’t have strong enough items to feed to their Consumption mechanics recently, keeping them from catching up to him as the ceiling rose, being John’s own level.

The more pressing question was how much damage Beatrice had taken and the answer was: a decent amount. 300 Health Points were gone, just from the start of the breath attack. She still had 2000 more though and regenerated 13 per second. There was no need to be overly concerned. Although this meant that it would have dealt 1000 damage had she not had her Elemental Resistance. That was a much scarier thought.

The attack had definitely succeeded in angering the Dragonkin either way, and Beatrice turned to run. Immediately upon losing sight of her opponent, she used Twist Position to move a metre diagonally forwards in something that was a mixture of teleporting and dashing. The decision to not go straight-ahead was what saved her as the Dragonkin slammed his weapon down in its entire, several metre length. Even getting hit by the shaft would have been lethal, as it would surely have exposed her to a follow-up attack.

Beatrice didn’t make that judgement blindly, though. John had sent the Mandala Sphere after her to give her a secondary point of view even as she retreated at full force. Essentially, he was giving her tail-vision, which was quite useful when running from a colossal lizard centaur. It also confirmed to John that the female Dragonkin around the corner didn’t move, at least not yet. She must have been waiting for the fighting sounds to grow more urgent or for someone to enter her own field of view. Either of these worked, at least theoretically, in John’s favour.

‘Now to find out whether all of this preparation was actually worth the time,’ John thought as Beatrice headed for the entrance. It was still entirely possible that the Dragonkin wouldn’t leave the dungeon, even if it was to chase an enemy. Given what he had learned about them being permanently wounded, that could be abused in its own way though, so he would be happy with whatever happened.

Beatrice ran past the withdrawn stone teeth, and the Dragonkin let out an angry roar as he, with surprising grace, cut the corner. All four legs trampled over the floor, gaining speed down the stone slope. Then, he slowed down. John anticipated that this was the point at which the enemy would turn around. No, he didn’t. He had just noticed the swamp in front of him and didn’t want to storm into it at the speed of a car on the highway. At least, not until he saw Beatrice just run straight through water and towards John’s position.

Much to the Gamer’s glee, the Dragonkin drew the wrong conclusion, thinking the water to be shallow, and accelerated again. This monster seemed quite rash in his decision making, not even stopping to look around, putting one foot into the water and immediate losing his footing as he slammed down expecting solid ground, to find only water.

The pathways that John had Gnome create under the surface were almost invisible and, more importantly, only half a metre wide. For a quadrupedal creature of the Dragonkin’s size, the way was narrower than the distance between his legs alone. He couldn’t chase down that path even if he knew exactly where it ran along.

Carried by momentum, the second front leg also slammed into the water. The Dragonkin reacted correctly by slamming the tip of his glaive into the path that he knew was there to prevent himself from slumping further. An explosion of steam occurred as the heat enchantment on the weapon caused the surrounding water to boil instantly. Left to his own, the monster would have succeeded in stemming himself back onto land, his hindlegs desperately securing his position.

Hindlegs that were now quite the obvious weak spot, open to attacks from the two Strength focused members of the party. Aclysia and Gnome, moving from their tactical position at the sides of the entrance, stormed forwards. Ramming into the legs with sword and heavy body, they shoved the Dragonkin the rest of the way forwards. It screamed in panic, for a moment just on its belly, lying on the pathway. Then a wave of water hit from the left, Undine having gathered strength for a moment like this, causing the Dragonkin to tumble into the deepened swamp water.

The rest of the fight was unspectacular. The Dragonkin tried to get back onto land, thrashing around, trying to grab something. Whenever he did. Gnome would either transform whatever he grabbed into mud or she would simply stomp and punch the hand until the Dragonkin let go. If that didn’t work, Aclysia could always slash at it. The water level visibly decayed with time, the Dragonkin’s body heat and weapon enchantment boiling much of it away, but that didn’t really matter. At the very least, it wasn’t quick enough to solve the monster’s predicament before a rain of attack spells by John and Sylph ended his life, with an occasional punch by Salamander against the fire immune enemy mixed in.

It was a thoroughly dirty victory. The Dragonkin held onto dear life for quite some time. He was clearly strong, terrifyingly so, but brought into a position where he couldn’t utilize that strength, he might as well have been target practice. Once it was clear that he was unable to get out, though, John ended him by using Arcana Strike. Throwing the utterly destructive spell against an immobile swamp-victim was definitely unfair. Though, that didn’t lessen the rewards whatsoever.

John could only smile at the ridiculousness of all that.