Chapter 336: Dragons, O Dragons! Part Two
I happened to re-read my draft and it was just too goddamn much, so I cut about 3,000 characters from even this. Having your brain turn into three women really is no good… (self-control)
Raid Monster, The Great Red Devourer, the Crazed Horde of Blue, max participants, current participants… The conclusion I reached after factoring everything in was brutally simple.
Yeah, this is impossible. No, seriously.
Sunraku: "Tottori, take the elves and run… and while you're at it, take Emul too."
Tottori: "…Yeah, it reeks of impossible, huh?"
Sunraku: "At the very least, there's no way you beat a raid boss with just three people. I'll use myself and this meat shield here to stall it. You use that time to make a break for the frontline base."
Deep Throater: "I'd rather be a toilet than a shield."
Sunraku: "I'll use you up 'til you're ground meat. Prepare yourself."
Deep Throater: "Ooh, so passionate!"
Want me to turn you into a lump of meat right now?
Emul: "Wh-What are you saying, wa, Sunraku-san! I'm fighting too, wa!!"
Don't be stupid. In a system that's essentially permanent autosave with no way to go back, how could I let an NPC die for nothing?
Sunraku: "Don't worry, Emul. It's basically like going over to a friend's house. The elf save-house is already destroyed, so… the last one's Skull Azuchi. Let's meet up there."
Emul: "B-But…"
Sunraku: "Besides, Emul. Guarding those two is the quest I accepted… but it's basically a job we pull off together, right? Right person for the right job. If the Third Knight Order attacks, you can protect them, can't you?"
Emul opened her mouth at my words, but the words wouldn't come out of her throat. She just stared at me in silence, then hung her head as if she'd given up.
Emul: "Uuu… I understand, wa."
Sunraku: "Good girl. That's a good girl… Well then, Your Majesty, Your Highness. As you can see, that thing isn't something we can handle by normal means, so I'll be taking the rear guard."
Toravante: "…Mm. You do us a great service. I shall not forget this debt."
Aria: "Sunraku-sama… may fortune favor you."
It'd be dangerous to take a knee with that thing right behind us, so I just gave a light bow. But neither the king nor Fa—nor Aria made any move to fault me for it.
Tottori: "Sunraku… Deep Throater-san, sorry."
Sunraku: "Don't sweat it, Tottori. Well… after I respawn, buy me something nice."
Deep Throater: "Speaking of which, That cook from Schwarz Vulf whom I sent over... ah, Black Blade now, was it? I hear he's planning to open a shop here eventually…"
A cook, huh… I once heard a rumor that becoming a cook is the most efficient way to train swordsman-type skills. It's so absurd I can't help but laugh.
Tottori: "Got it… you'd better give me the info on that monster later. Let's go, everyone!"
The moment I and Deep Throater moved to stall while the rest tried to pull out—
Great Red Devourer: "Puyarrrrrrrrrraaaaaaaaa!!"
Sunraku: "Wha—"
Sunraku: "Shit, that was close!?"
Half my vision went red. Faster than my brain could process it, I reflexively dropped low, and something swept through the space where my upper body had just been. It blasted Deep Throater, who failed to dodge, sending Deep Throater flying, and entangled the severed Tyranno head, whose life-light was just about to go out…
Sunraku: "Huh?"
Aryur: "Ah…"
The elves, right as they were about to flee. From among them, it grabbed two elves who'd been right near a girl I recognized—grabbed them like a tape measure reeling in—and retracted back toward the main body… toward the Great Red Devourer.
???: "Aryur…"
???: "Run…"
Squelch.
Like a vertically aligned maw, it bared its crimson ribs like fangs. A crunching that gave you the absolute certainty—like the moment an iron maiden closes—that when it opened again, they definitely wouldn't be alive. The dragon's chest, probably gouged open by some high-power attack until bone was exposed, moved with a biologically impossible squirming as it chewed up the elves and the severed Tyranno head. The damage effects just barely visible through the gaps were all the more grotesquely vivid.
And then, with a movement that looked almost like swallowing…
From its back… it sprouted a third Tyranno head… and two elves.
The air froze. An instant-death attack aimed at NPCs, treating players as nothing more than obstacles. The two elves, now dyed solid red like the Great Red Devourer itself, were—true to the absolute textbook example for this kind of depiction—yes, textbook to a fault, grotesque in their actions. Namely, they muttered fragments of words from their former lives like delirious rambling, while aiming what looked like an organ fused with a bow straight at us.
???: "Run… r-run, run…"
???: "Our treasure… trea-sure, nononono…"
Aryur: "NOOOOOOOOO!!!"
As if the scream of Aryur, the elf girl left behind, was the trigger—the dam of rationality holding back the NPCs' terror burst.
Sunraku: "Ah, damn it… of all the goddamn ways to fire off a first move…!"
Even a player would piss themselves at this. I deflected the flesh-colored arrow shot at me and stepped forward. If I let myself get tagged with "couldn't stall 'em 'cause they weren't targeting me," those bastards would use it as joke material for life!
Sunraku: "Deep Throater! You're alive anyway, so get your ass in the fight! Tottori, get the NPCs out, you can come back for me later if you want! If an NPC tied to me dies, I'll bad-mouth you for generations!!"
Tottori: "Kh… I'm leaving it to you!!"
The first player answered with a word. The second player answered with a spell name.
Deep Throater: "[Titanomachia]!!"
The familiar earthen fist of a titan uppercutted the Great Red Devourer from directly below, right as it was opening its chest cavity again and extending a tentacle-tongue toward the NPCs.
Deep Throater: "Nfuh, nhehehehe… my body's shaking like crazy, but Sunraku-kun's trust is gonna make me climax… when I die, I wanna die on top of Sunraku-kun's belly…"
Sunraku: "Shut up. Even if you die, keep moving."
Deep Throater: "Huh? Necrophilia's your kink? Mandatory dead-fish mode means I can't enjoy it, so that's a little… I mean, it's an attack spell from a Magic Scroll, sure, but that thing took a direct hit and it's still kicking… really makes my mo-dick-vation shrivel, y’know…"
The basic premise was a forty-five-man raid. With numbers this low, even Reject might not be a viable option. I should be grateful there was even a stagger animation based on the physics engine.
Emul: "Sunraku-san! Good luck, waaaah!!"
Emul's voice grew distant, along with the sound of many footsteps. Deep Throater pulled out an MP recovery potion and started making weird schlopp-schlopp sounds, but looking over would be a waste of time, so I ignored it. In this case, the firepower wasn't for killing—it was for drawing aggro. That's why I couldn't use Duxram, Blade of Aspiration at this stage. I needed raw, simple power to force its attention on me.
Deep Throater: "Actually, y'know… Sunraku-kuuun, could it be… that you were aiming for this situation?"
Sunraku: "Huh? How the hell did you reach that conclusion?"
Deep Throater: "The Tyrant Golem."
Sunraku: "…………"
Deep Throater: "I'm pretty sure that time too, you took it down with a first-try speed-kill with, like, five people… the reward for beating it—'HKT'—really gave me trouble."
Ah, that brings back memories. "Heart Knock Tyrant." In Spell Creation Online, the first player to clear a raid boss got to name the magic and write the incantation. With the enemy faction monopolizing all the good magic, new raid boss spells were vital assets for us in the Resistance… we cleared that thing by any means necessary. For the record, "Heart Knock Tyrant," a.k.a. "HKT"—which was actually taken from a real death metal band's song—was prized as a practical self-destruct spell: you'd charge forward while scattering beams in all directions, combined with other magic.
Sunraku: "Even I'm not aiming for that kinda shit in SLF. First off, the cap's forty-five people… in other words, it's a boss so nasty it's questionable whether even forty-five could beat it. It's impossible."
Deep Throater: "Hey, hey… don't give me that lukewarm crap, Sunraku-kuuun…"
Sunraku: "Hah?"
I jumped at full strength, and the Great Red Devourer's… tongue? Tentacle? Whatever, its tongue swept through the spot my feet had just occupied. Deep Throater failed to dodge, had both legs spectacularly swept out, and toppled headfirst. At this point, I wouldn't be surprised if Deep Throater died, but whether through some trick, that HP bar still showed no sign of hitting zero. Deep Throater staggered back up and, unlike the usual leering grin, twisted those lips upward with a provocative emotion.
Deep Throater: "You're way more reckless than this, aren't you…? I dunno how precious that rabbit and the others are to you, but… if you just need to get them outta here, then beating the shit outta this thing doesn't change the outcome one bit, does it…?"
Sunraku: "…Meaning?"
Deep Throater: "So let's kick it up a gear, yeah? Spray the oil, let's go 'til our brain-juice sprays out too, let's—bffh."
As if it hadn't forgotten the grudge from the earlier uppercut, the Great Red Devourer caught Deep Throater with a scooping strike from below and sent Deep Throater flying through the air. The Great Red Devourer… nice. If we'd met under different circumstances, maybe we could've been friends.
Sunraku: "But I'm killing you. Let's fucking do this…"
The job's still to buy time. But if Deep Throater's gonna taunt me with even shitty rap, I can't just stay quiet. If I let my old enemy from Spell Creation Online make a fool of me this badly without a word back, I'd never be able to face my old war buddies. I readied Dis Pater, Nether King’s Mirror Shield, in my left hand and Areadbhair Rebuild in my right, and made a declaration, as if posing a question.
Sunraku: "You know what, Great Red Devourer? Raid bosses are pretty much fated to get soloed by maxed-out players."
Guess I'll just max myself out right here and now. Let's go, first-try clear!!
Forbidden Word: Devouring Dragon Unlike that thing, this one's forcibly using its wounds as a mouth.
Deep Throater's fighting style is built around the absolute premise of not dying, so the character is ridiculously tenacious. Naturally, the build has 100 LUK to hit the guaranteed-survival threshold, and with accessories and whatnot, getting blown away once or twice won't be enough to kill Deep Throater.