Mai and Yui’s OP stampede carried them all the way to their destination. Before them was a wide, open plain, the grasses rippling in the wind.
No monsters around. No structures of note. No caves or visible cracks (like the one they’d fought the poison blob in).
They looked up, but they saw only clear blue skies.
“Here?”
“According to the map.”
“But…”
“There’s nothing around!”
However, this was clearly the place. The proof came a moment later, when the ground started rumbling.
Darkness started emerging from the ground. It was much like the Dark Rebirth visuals, so they all quickly backed off.
Would something pop out at them? Was this an attack? All they knew was that it was quest related. They braced themselves for anything.
“……Nothing else?”
“The black stuff stopped.”
“I see a light in the middle…is that a magic circle?”
The darkness had stopped spreading, though the edges were rippling a bit. Something magical was giving off dark energy at the center, a dubious invitation.
“Best you put up Martyr’s Devotion now, Maple.”
“Roger that!”
What followed would not be as easy to deal with as the way in. And as always, Mai, Yui, and Sally could all die to a single blow.
Martyr’s Devotion was a vital skill in any battle.
“Just in case, let’s check those items.”
The disposable items they’d been given at the test center would negate the effect of a specific boss skill.
They were fairly powerful…and they had three of them. Proof this would be one tough customer.
Sally took two of the items, and she left one with Maple. Sally had the best situational judgment, and she often handled item use; Maple kept one on the grounds that she was the hardest to kill, and this mitigated the risks.
Sensing danger, they steeled their nerves. No matter how tough a boss this was, they were pretty strong. No need to spook themselves—as long as Martyr’s Devotion kept them safe. They stepped onto the black magic circle.
✦ ✦ ✦
Black energy teleported them away, and when it died down and they could see, they quickly looked around.
They were still on a grassy plain. But the blue skies had given way to heavy clouds. The much stronger wind felt ominous.
“Incoming.”
Once again, something black spread out across the ground. But this would not transport them elsewhere—it transported in the monster they were here to fight, the final boss of the quest chain they’d been following.
Spindly, pitch-black limbs like withered branches. A skeletal animal making snapping sounds as it moved. Its ragged cape was red with bloodstains, and a mask covered its face. At the tip of the bone staff it held was a sinister blue fire, the same color as its eyes. That alone was deeply unnerving.
It swung the staff and the inky darkness moved, swirling like a vortex, spreading outward.
“Focus!”
“Yeah!”
““Right!””
The darkness cleared. Even if Maple’s skill had not been active, this would have done no damage. That much they knew from the little intel available.
Where had the grasslands gone? They were now standing in the depths of a forest, towering trees looming over them. The boss was gone and they could hear enemies approaching from every direction.
“The forest? Luck’s with us; no need to skip.”
“All right!”
This boss had an unusual trick. It used a skill to regularly warp them to a new area, with several potential locations.
The quest items allowed them to skip an area if it proved a poor match for the party.
Maple made it so this group could handle most areas. Places normal parties couldn’t survive long in were nothing to them. This forest didn’t have any tricky terrain; in their minds, it was one of the better options.
A few dozen shadowy humanoid creatures had them surrounded. Their exteriors were darker than the night, their eyes glowing blue like the boss’s. They had long arms and nails, and their willowy bodies suggested they were speedy creatures.
And as expected, they began running in circles around the party, their attacks too fast for the eye to see.
Being surrounded meant attacks came from their blind spots—only Sally could react in time. The other three simply soaked hits from the monsters’ claws.
“We’re good!”
““Thank you, Maple!””
If the creatures had no piercing damage, there was no need to end this quickly or use their limited skills. True to their appearance, they were fast but not powerful—there was no knockback.
The enemies were attacking in numbers, with constant hits, but with Maple around, they might as well be doing nothing. With safety guaranteed, the party searched for the missing boss.
“Where’d it go?”
“Everything but the boss is an infinite spawn, so we’ve gotta track it down.”
“We can thin them out!”
“So we can see better…”
If these enemies came to them, that was ideal. Mai and Yui got their twelve hammers spinning, pulverizing anything that came near.
The twins did all their level grinding like this, so they were now very comfortable with the process. It wasn’t quite automatic, but they could keep the hammers spinning and also look for the boss.
“There it is!”
Through the mowed-down monsters, Sally spotted the boss hiding in the trees.
“Mai!”
“Yup……!”
Once spotted, it was theirs. Certain Maple had them protected, the twins stopped spinning the hammers and fixed their eyes on the boss.
Paying no attention to the pouncing mobs, they sent a shock wave right at the real enemy.
““Farshot!””
The monsters swarming them shattered like glass. The tree trunks burst at the base, toppling over on the boss itself and flattening it. A flawless ultimate, yet more than half the boss’s HP remained.
“We were lacking intel, but clearly we can’t one-shot this one.”
Players that were just as OP had been appearing, but the twins remained the only players who could easily one-shot a boss without extensive prep work. That was the main reason for the lack of data on this boss’s mechanics.
Their easy victory thwarted, they were once again subsumed by darkness.
“We aren’t taking damage!”
“Which means…”
Their vision cleared, and they were in a plain white cubical room. The boss was in sight. Mai and Yui reset their weapons.
“Careful, I’ve got no intel on—?!”
The boss swung its staff, and the party’s feet left the floor. But they were falling toward the ceiling. Gravity reversed, forcibly moving them to the new “ground” above.
“Whoaaaa!”
“At least Martyr’s Devotion didn’t soak that!”
If Maple had shouldered the gravity reversal for all of them, Mai and Yui would be left on the ground below.
As they fell, glowing black skulls flew toward them.
Unlike in the previous area, they had no clue what this might do to them and were in no position to fight back. Sally deemed this high risk.
“Maple, let me show you something cool. Leviathan!”
A blue magic circle generated a torrent of water, thick as a tornado. The water at the front formed a dragon’s head, and the coiling stream behind it looked like the dragon’s body.
This swallowed up all incoming attacks, negating them and bearing down on the boss itself. The boss teleported out of the way, but that gave them enough time to land and right themselves.
“Heh-heh, a solid match for your Hydra.”
“Wow, Sally! Water Wielding?”
“Yup, yup.”
She’d made such extensive use of it that the skill had leveled up, providing more sub-skills. And using that one here had let them regroup. Best to clear this room and get out. All eyes turned toward the boss, which was floating some distance away, its staff glowing again.