Translator: Kurehashi Aiko
A huge pure-white sword is swung and its blade cuts deep into Luukan’s side. But even after many more attacks like that, Luukan showed no sign of even being staggered. Instead, its wounds closed quickly, as if no damage was inflicted upon it in the first place.
But since we were fighting it for quite some time now, surely we must have been chipping away at its resources. In fact, it wasn’t spawning its alter-egos as often as before, and the number of shadow spears it was summoning from the ground also decreased considerably. Would that be the limit, or was there a reason for his patterns to become like that? To figure that one out it would be nice to have a strategy guide, but sadly no such thing was available to me at the current moment.
「How much more!?」
「Only once!」
Luukan breaks the wooden log with its fangs and at the same time Mana Shaker assaults its hind legs. This brought Luukan’s attention towards us, but it was actually a good thing. The more it is focused on us, the safer Rei becomes.
Although we’ve been good so far into the fight, there are going to be problems we’ll have to address one way or another.
「I’m terribly sorry, but I can’t use “Utsusemi” anymore!」
「That’s okay, now stand back!」
Apparently Ninja class was equipped with a special item called “Wooden Shinobi Logs” which was used to activate their class skills. At the same time, if you run out of said logs you wouldn’t be able to use your skills any longer. And seeing that Akitsu Akane couldn’t predict that he’d be going against Luukan, he burned through his load of logs relatively quickly.
Another string of letters appears right in front of my eyes: “Operational Time Limit; Less Than Two Minutes Remaining”. Unfortunately the reactor I had on me is rechargeable, so it means that whatever I choose to power it up with will only work for a limited amount of time. And that limit was fast approaching.
And not only Rei’s, but my own concentration was slowly approaching its limits.
(Just one more time and Rei’s trump card conditions will be satisfied. But will we be able to hold on until then?)
Less than two minutes remaining. In less than two minutes Suzaku will be gone and the moon will no longer be shining upon the battlefield. It will be much harder for us to do anything then.
The impatience hastened my movements and I had to watch out even more on Luukan’s attacks from now on. After all, it was a kind of game where snakes can throw sh*t at you, so the only way to go forward was to expect the unexpected.
「Rei! Next attack please!」
「Give me a minute to prepare!」
Suzaku’s limit was fast approaching. With so many timers going on at the same time in my mind, it was becoming increasingly harder for me to keep track of which skill was about to end and which was about to go off cooldown.
As for Luukan, it was turning out to be even more of a dirty cheater, predicting my movements to a fault and anticipating where I wanted to appear in advance. I was barely keeping up with dodging its giant fangs closing on my head.
「What to do…… I heard from Rei that her trump card is difficult to hit with, so we would have to pin it down and stop it from moving somehow……」
I don’t have any skill that would effectively stop it from moving and Emul’s chains are offering very little in that regard as well. If so, our only real option would be to rain attacks that forcibly stop it from moving on it, which is the bane of Mobs existence in every game. It would be best to use my own trump card here, but…… For me it would also be hard to hit it with it unless it stopped moving completely. Not impossible, but difficult.
「How should we approach this…… Special attack? Normal attacks? Or maybe something else entirely……?」
It’s not just a matter of guessing. We need to get as close as we can for Rei’s trump card to hit, and in order to keep it immobile we must successfully manage its fear factor. Realizing just how tall of an order that is, I wanted to laugh out loud.
「Try to collect aggro and pin it down in one place…… No, that would turn out to be really bad if we got wiped out all at once. We need to be as efficient as possible with as little attacks as possible. But what about the insta-kill attacks of this thing…… Oh fuck!」
I avoided a flurry of front legs attacks that were fast and deadly, keeping my distance to avoid the shock waves that they were produced upon hitting the ground. Then I closed the distance and got ready to counter-attack on my own.