"The expiration of a Remain Light can be averted through the use of resurrection spells and rare items, but even this lesser death is not without consequence. When a player reaches zero HP, they immediately suffer the loss of 10% of the accrued EXP towards their next level, as well as 10% of the points earned in all equipped skills. At low levels, this is not an especially onerous penalty. But at higher levels, when both skills and EXP accumulate far more slowly, a single death can mean the loss of weeks or even months of grinding..."
—Alfheim Online manual, «Death Penalty»
4 May 2023: Day 180
People who didn't know Klein very well often assumed that he wasn't very smart. True, he could be dense, especially where women were concerned—but that just meant that he was sometimes slow to pick up on signals that others found more obvious. He was perfectly capable of what he considered to be strokes of genius and insight, they just sometimes took a while—and the last six months in Alfheim had been something of a crash course in adapting to and surviving unfamiliar new situations.
So it was really no surprise to Klein that he found himself reflecting on the wisdom of letting Eugene hire his group as advance scouts for a boss battle—after all, nothing good had ever come of getting mixed up with the Salamander clearing groups. He just wished that the epiphany hadn't come while he and his friends were fleeing for their lives from a gateway boss labeled with the torturously unpronounceable name of «Hrungnir». And that distracting train of thought ended just in time for him to narrowly avoid becoming one with the floor under his feet; he threw himself to the side as a fist like a boulder cratered the herringbone-patterned tiles of the floor, spalled bits of stone and ceramic peppering him with a stinging sensation that the system didn't seem to consider painful enough to suppress.
"Dynamm, Harry, break left!" Coming quickly back to his feet and putting on a burst of speed to avoid the follow-up slash from a shimmering axe blade, he saved himself the time of ordering the other three to break right—the implication was clear, given the wedge-shaped monolith looming before them to let them know what their options were. Klein went left, leaping into the air to avoid the blast radius as an explosion of fire struck the ground just behind them, his natural resistances tempering the damage and leaving him mostly unscathed by the near-miss.
The maneuver worked much like the switch tactic; by splitting his group into two equal parts, Klein had forced the mob to pause for a moment while it prioritized targets and decided which direction to pursue, resetting its attack patterns. It gave them extra meters of space they hadn't had before—possibly enough to get to the entrance or pull the boss beyond its tether radius. Assuming it had one, that is; it had chased them well beyond the chamber in which they'd found it.
The moment's pause seemed far too short; with a grinding snarl, the massive four-armed Jotunn pulled its fist from the ground and lumbered into pursuit of Klein's trio of players. He didn't dare take the time to turn his head to look, but he could feel the ground shuddering beneath his feet as he put on every last bit of speed he could muster, the pounding footsteps growing closer while his group dodged around stone columns to break the mob's line of sight. He could see the imposing double doors where they'd come in, beckoning like sanctuary. "Come on, you piece of crap, tether already!"
It didn't, and Klein could've sworn that the suggestion or the way it was phrased had grossly offended it. A mighty stone-clad fist pounded the ground again mere meters behind him, sending him sprawling into another breakfall roll across the floor. Harry grabbed his arm as he scrambled back to his feet, and Klein saw several wide-eyed Salamanders holding the entrance doors open as his other friends frantically waved him across the home stretch. He heard the air behind him parting grudgingly once more before the giant's weapon, and put everything he had into one desperate lunge.
Only once he'd thrown himself through the door did Klein allow himself to look back. He could see the boss crouching a few dozen meters inside with a tracer of translucent green fading from the air through which its axe had just cut, space that moments before had been home to Klein's head. It gazed at them with what Klein took for rage or a good attempt at faking it; the doorway was too small for it to fit through despite being thrice the height of even Eugene, and it didn't seem inclined to use its ranged attacks on targets it couldn't pursue. Several mages standing outside unloaded spells at it as soon as they had a clear line of sight, most of them crying out as they found their magic reflected back at them with a flash of yellow from the energy field surrounding the boss, an AOE fireball going off in the midst of their group and scattering them like sticks.
"Stop casting!" Klein yelled from the ground.
Eugene, the Salamander in command of the raid force, seemed to have the same idea—but his gravelly bellows and the demonstrated consequences of such stupidity were a lot more effective at gaining compliance than Klein's hasty warning. Before the other Salamander clearers got the doors closed, Klein caught a glimpse of the boss as it turned and slowly disappeared down the hallway without looking back, each footstep vibrating the ground just a little less than the last.
The silence that settled after the giant's footsteps could no longer be heard was broken only by a handful of murmurs amongst the groups of Salamander and Imp clearers, and by the curt sound of leather brushing metal as Klein got back to his feet and swept his hands over his armor to shed some of the dirt. He looked up as a large torchlight shadow fell over him.
"I think that little show oughta save us the first round of questions, Eugene," Klein said, tilting his head to one side and then the other in a vain attempt to crack his neck—something that ALO avatars didn't seem capable of doing, and that he habitually kept trying to do anyway. "You saw the thing. Name's Furunguniiru, or however the hell you're supposed to pronounce that Norse stuff. He's sitting in a cozy little chamber a ways in; the hallway winds a bit before you get to him. He's easily as big as the Jotunn Lord my guys and I fought in the Valley of Giants. Except this one's got four arms, no gear, and a worse attitude. And nothing we did scratched it—even spells just got reflected back." He grimaced. "You probably noticed."
"You certainly succeeded in getting its attention," remarked a petite Imp woman with curly black hair who stood with a dozen others of her kind, regarding him and his mixed-raced group with open curiosity.
"If by that you mean, we aggroed the hell out of it, then yeah, lady, you're right on the money."
"I've never seen a boss chase a scouting party that far before," Eugene mused, folding his thick arms across the breastplate of his armor. "It didn't even act like it had tethered—just like it decided that it couldn't get at us here."
Something similar had occurred to Klein, and he didn't like the sound of it one bit. It sounded far too much like thinking, and he preferred that the things he had to kill did nothing of the sort, or at least as little of it as possible.
"We've been seeing more advanced behavior from mobs as we get deeper into Yggdrasil," remarked a silver-haired Salamander clearer whom Klein had seen before but never spoken with or heard named. The man's voice was crisp and smooth, every word precise. "I think it would be wise not to assume that we know how a mob is going to behave just because it resembles a known base type."
Eugene nodded. "I think that's a sound approach no matter what, Heathcliff. I want to hear more from Klein and his group, though. Tell me about its attacks."
"Well, you saw it had four arms," Klein said, liking this boss fight less every time someone opened their mouth. "Each seems to do something different. Lower-left arm tosses fireballs—and they're fast. Faster than a player projectile, and no incantation to warn you it's coming. Small splash radius but plenty of oomph. The upper-left has some kind of wispy transparent axe that's hard to see and is longer than it looks; that's its primary melee attack. The lower right is empty-handed but gets used for grappling and melee—that's the one it pounds the ground with. Upper right is empty-handed too, but I didn't see it attack with it."
Eugene received and digested this information in patient silence. "So the only ranged attack you saw was fire. That's good news for us. Did you learn anything else that could help? Any idea why spells are getting reflected?"
"I think there's some kind of magic shield around the boss," Klein said after a moment, looking back at the doors leading into the boss room as if half-expecting the giant to come bursting through them. "Whenever we struck it, it would flash real bright for a moment. Any physical attack just got an «Immortal Object» pop-up. And you saw what happened when your guys lit into it with spells."
Eugene gave several of the mages in his clearers a pointed look. "And this is why we wait for the scouting data, people. I'm glad you're so enthusiastic, but let's not go off half-assed. Some of you are goddamned lucky we've got solid fire resistances."
"You forgot something, Klein," Dale said once Eugene's little tirade was finished. In response to Klein's raised eyebrows, his oversized Gnome friend elaborated. "Before we hauled ass out of there, I tried hitting it with a Stumble spell to give us some time. You know how the shield around the boss briefly flashed yellow every time the rest of you cast at it? Nobody else was casting right then, and when my Stumble spell hit, the shield flashed green instead. And my spell wasn't reflected. But he sure as shit came after me then."
"There's a puzzle here," Eugene said immediately. Klein wasn't the only person nodding at his words. "A sequence of some kind. Hit it with the right spell at the right time and you… I'm betting that's how we get through the shield."
"So what's with the colors?" asked another of the Salamander clearer leads.
"Yellow was a failure, green a success," Eugene said. "Were there any other colors? Any different reactions from the boss or the shield?"
He looked at his friends one at a time before answering; they all shook their heads. "That was all we saw. Physical attacks got the pop-up message. Everyone's spells except Dale's got reflected with a yellow flash and made you sorry you cast. Dale's got eaten with a green flash but didn't reflect. Nothing did jack for damage or had any noticeable effect."
Eugene turned and looked at his senior clearers. "Thoughts?"
"It's definitely a sequence puzzle," said the Imp woman who'd spoken before. "We've been seeing a few of these here and there as we progress—where you have to hit a key crystal or something with a specific element. That's blocked us a few times until we found someone who had the right school of magic."
"I think you're on to something there, Kumiko." One of the unnamed Salamander clearers chewed at his lip and narrowed his eyes in thought before going on. "Every element has a color. It's the color of the spell effects for that element, and it's usually the color of the flight trail for the race linked to that element."
"Earth is yellow," Dale said, that being the element with which his own race had an affinity. "But that's the color it flashed every time we hit it with the wrong thing."
"No," said Eugene with a snap of the fingers. "That's the color it flashed to let you know what the right element was."
"But obviously just hitting it with the one Earth spell wasn't enough this time," Heathcliff pointed out. "Think it through. What's the next step?"
Klein was starting to get his head around the strategy for this battle, and it filled him with an aggressive desire to be somewhere else, doing something else. Anything else. But he'd been hired to take his group and scout this battle, and that meant giving a full debrief. And the more the raid group could figure out before giving battle, the less likely anyone was to die in the process.
"When we hit it with anything that wasn't Earth," Klein said slowly, "it flashed yellow to tell us what we should be using. Then it flashed green when Dale hit it with Earth. So is the green like a green traffic signal, telling you you got it right?"
"No," said one of the Salamander mages, one who hadn't joined in on the wild flurry of attacks a few minutes prior. There was nothing but confidence in his voice. "Green is the color of Wind. It's telling us the next element in the sequence." Dynamm, the lone Sylph present and the recipient of more than a few unfriendly looks from the Salamander raid, nodded along. Now that the mage had pointed it out, Klein was surprised it had taken even that long—after all, it wasn't as if the veteran Salamanders had any shortage of exposure to Sylph magic in combat. But then, Klein hadn't figured it out either, and he fought alongside Dynamm every day.
Eugene seemed to have similar experience with that magic, and knew a breakthrough when he heard one. His head whipped around, and he smacked a fist into his open hand with a solid metallic sound. "That's got to be it, Pyrin. I know you've got Wind—how many others?" Two hands went up; a boy in light plate armor standing next to Heathcliff and another of the mages. Eugene's lips twisted. "Bunch of slackers."
"Be fair, Eugene," protested the named mage who'd pointed out the significance of the color. "We've only got so many skill slots, and with the Imps handling most of the debuffs, we don't usually need more than one or two people with Wind."
"Let me know when this game becomes fair," Eugene growled, turning to address Pyrin. "You're not wrong, but after this raid I think we're going to sit down and review the skill balance in our mage groups. I may have one or two of you clear up a slot for lesser-used elements."
"That'll mean losing progress in whatever element one of us swaps out," Pyrin replied, dragging open his menu and making vertical motions with one finger as if scrolling through a list. "We'll adapt, but just remember that unequipped skills decay when you don't use 'em for long."
Eugene glanced sidewise at Klein and his group. "We'll table this for later. Any more observations your guild wants to add?"
Klein made a brief circuit of his friends with his eyes; when no one spoke up after a moment, he shook his head. "Nah. Just… be careful with this one, man. It wanted us, bad. And the mechanics are new, uncertain, and full of suck."
Eugene snorted. "We'll learn the mechanics, and we've got a solid group of clearers here that can handle anything. But thanks." He drew open his menu and manifested a small bag in his hand; Klein accepted the payment with a nod. "Good scouting work, but it's time for you to go now—we'll take it from here." And so saying, he turned back to the clearers and loudly clapped his gauntleted hands above his head. "Okay, listen up! MT group on me, OT 1 and OT 2 flanking, mage and DPS groups in reverse chevron formation behind, loose columns with melee on the outside and ranged taking up the rear—"
"Ranged always takes it up the rear!" The catcall came from near the back of the raid, and the nervous laughter that ensued caused Eugene to stare broadswords in the presumed direction of the heckler before continuing.
"Tank groups will form a rotating bulwark—buy us time to experiment. Mage groups prepare defensive buffs, but cast nothing else. I want no attacks except on my word—no debuffs, no DPS, nothing hits that boss until I call for it. All melee groups, until I call for DPS use weapon techniques to parry only—nothing that inflicts status. Pyrin, I want you to shuffle two of your mage groups so that all schools of magic are represented at least once in each group..."
Klein couldn't bring himself to be unhappy about being left out of this one—he had a bad feeling about this particular boss, and he hated timing puzzles with a fiery passion. Besides, his group had been clearing almost non-stop for the past week, and they were due for a couple days of downtime. Maybe he could justify a trip to Freelia…
"Klein?" Dynamm waved a hand in his face, dropping him out of his thoughts.
Absently slapping away the hand, Klein pushed the Salamander raid out of his mind. "Right. Anyone up for a vacay in the Land of Flying Cats?"
·:·:·:·:·:·
Something must have shown on Tetsuo's face. Always attentive, his group leader's slate-gray eyes slid to the side and regarded him with that same unflappable calm that virtually never seemed to escape him. "Don't get yourself worked up without cause," Heathcliff said after a few beats, his eyes going back to Eugene while their raid leader made last-minute adjustments to the group makeup. "General Eugene is quite adept at analyzing mob mechanics and devising strategies to counter them; you need only wait for him to select a course of action and then follow his instructions to the letter. That makes your job much easier."
Tetsuo couldn't quite suppress the snort, but he tried to cover it with a cough—he had no desire to offend his group leader; the man had never treated him with anything but respect. "Um… yeah, I mean, I get it and I'll totally do my job... but how do you figure that makes things any easier for me?"
"Because it frees you from the need to burden yourself with complex decisions in the midst of battle," Heathcliff answered quietly. "You have a defined role in this raid, this group—and no uncertainty about what the right choices are. You don't have to analyze. You don't have to decide. You just have to pay attention to your raid leader, and act on their word." He paused. "It's liberating, in a way. You're giving yourself entirely over to the role you're here to play."
"You know," Tetsuo said following a train of thoughts during which he didn't quite manage to fully engage the filter between his brain and his mouth, "sometimes you sound a lot like a larper."
"Show some respect, kid," came the snappy aside from another of their group members, a stocky Salamander with a thin path of fine red hair framing his jaw. He swatted Tetsuo in the arm for emphasis with the back of one mailed hand, although the blow was light and perfunctory—anything harder would be more uncomfortable for the person punching plate armor than it would be for the person wearing it.
But to Tetsuo's relief, Heathcliff seemed to find this exchange amusing for some reason. "Easy, Nephron." he echoed with the faintest of smiles. "Interesting that you should choose that particular neologism, Tetsuo."
Tetsuo wasn't quite sure what to make of that particular answer. He craned his head to try to see what Eugene was doing back near the mage groups. From what he could tell, their leader seemed to have them taking turns casting low-level spells at the wall as fast as possible. It didn't make any sense to him, which perhaps went a long way towards making Heathcliff's point. He turned back to his group leader with a belated reply. "Interesting?" he prompted.
"Interesting," Heathcliff agreed. "What is a larper, really? I don't find the label particularly useful, nor do I apply it to myself or anyone else. Is it not simply a term for someone who accepts the reality in which we find ourselves?"
"But this isn't reality," Tetsuo said with a frown.
That smile again. "Ah. But what is reality?"
"It's the place where I used to go on dates with Tetsuo's mom," said their group's healer, prompting a few snickers from the others and a roll of the eyes from his intended target, who made a point of not responding to the dig.
"Reality is… um… where things are real?"
"Define real," came the infuriatingly cryptic answer from his group leader. "How do you know what's real and what isn't?"
"Reality…" Tetsuo turned his brain inside out trying to grasp what Heathcliff was trying to say or ask. "It's… the things that actually are. Like, they really exist, and you can prove it."
"Prove how?" Heathcliff pressed. "Based upon what evidence?"
"Well… like… I don't know… like you can see and touch them?"
Wrong answer. Heathcliff looked back at him with that faint ghost of a smile, pointed at his eyes with his first two fingers, and then tapped those fingers on his other wrist. The message was abundantly, embarrassingly clear. Tetsuo looked down at his feet.
"I get it, boss," said Nephron, scratching at the line of his beard. "You're saying our reality is whatever we can actually see and touch and all, at any given time."
Heathcliff nodded with a satisfied look. "It's more complicated than that, but essentially, yes: perception is reality. There is, of course, the physical world we all left behind when we logged in. And do not misunderstand me—I look forward to the final boss battle as much as anyone in this world. But until then, all of this—" He waved a hand loosely at the walls of the World Tree dungeon around them. "This is our reality. The bodies and events in that other world matter only insofar as they permit our minds to continue to exist. The scope of what our minds perceive is what is truly real to us, and right now our minds perceive the world of Alfheim and all of its rules and logic." He looked pointedly at Tetsuo. "The sooner you embrace that truth, the likelier you are to survive to one day return to that other world, that other reality."
A sharp whistle relieved Tetsuo of the need to consider how to respond to that. All eyes in their group turned to where Eugene was standing with the mage groups. He locked eyes with Heathcliff and jerked with his thumb as he called out. "Get over here and bring that kid with you."
They both complied without hesitation; Heathcliff seemed perfectly content to drop the unexpected philosophical conversation about the nature of the universe. "What do you need, General?" he asked once they drew closer.
The Salamander raid leader focused on Tetsuo, giving him a measuring look that threatened to upend the composure he'd been trying to establish. "Tetsuo," he said, with an undertone that suggested he'd spoken the name mostly to remind himself of what it was. "You raised your hand when I asked about Wind magic. You're melee DPS, right?"
"Mostly," Tetsuo answered, nervously fidgeting a little and not caring for the way Eugene was asking about his choice of skills. He hastened to explain. "But I don't need hate skills in my role, and everyone in the DPS groups is encouraged to pick up a school of magic other than fire if we've got the slot. I picked Wind 'cause I party with friends in my free time and it's got some decent buffs."
Heathcliff raised his eyebrows slightly when Eugene turned to look at him. "A fair answer," the raid leader grunted. "And it might come in handy here. Are you good with it?"
"Skill's almost to 400," Tetsuo said with a little surprise. "And yeah, I can cast it in battle, if that's what you're asking."
"Good," Eugene said. "Heathcliff, I'm taking your boy and putting him in Emberlock's group for this fight; they've got no Wind users. He can tank for them if needed, and I'm giving you their tank—chances are the guy won't have much to do until we get the shield down anyway."
Tetsuo's mind whirled at this sudden change in what he'd thought his job was going to be. He looked to his group leader with a note of panic in his eyes. Heathcliff simply shrugged.
"Remember our earlier conversation? You don't have to figure out the right thing to do. You just have to obey the person whose job it is to figure that out. Look to your assist and do what he says." He patted Tetsuo on one pauldron almost paternally.
The advice was still less comforting than Tetsuo would've liked, but as their raid group began to maneuver through the yawning double doors, he tried to push stray thoughts out of his mind and focus on his surroundings, months of training beginning to assert itself and the tricky layout of the cavernous hallways through which they tread requiring all of his attention. The ceiling disappeared somewhere beyond the reach of torchlight, and numerous rune-carved obelisks stuck out from the ground at various heights and irregular intervals and angles like crystal formations. It looked to Tetsuo almost as if they'd burst through the tiled floor at some point in the ancient past, both blocking light and disrupting their formation—which had to loosen up in order for everyone to navigate the field of obstacles.
When they finally laid eyes on the boss, the sight of it nearly robbed Tetsuo of a few breaths. It was the largest boss they faced yet; he would've been surprised if it was much under twenty to twenty-five meters tall, its gnarled fists each big enough to crumple him up and swallow him whole with nothing sticking out. It sat at a stonework table that rose as high as a four-story building, and as the raid group rounded the corner and stopped at Eugene's signal, the giant tossed back the last of its drink and rose from its stool, a low growl rising into a snarl that reverberated from every surface as a red cursor and four HP bars appeared over its head.
"Incoming! MT in!" Eugene shouted. "Off-tank groups prepare to rotate!"
As it gave a great roar, flames danced around one of the giant's hands, coalescing rapidly into a churning fireball that it hurled at the oncoming group. A disc-shaped shield of fire appeared before the main tank group after a rapid chant by the group's healer, but their charge carried them past the attack and the fireball struck the ground a few meters behind them. Before the projectile struck, the air around another hand shimmered and formed into a sickly-green translucent axe, which it whirled without ceremony and swung towards the vanguard of the MT group. Their main tank's own parry sent the axe rebounding back, although Tetsuo saw the attack erode the player's HP despite the successful defense. As soon as the giant recovered, one of its empty hands whipped around and hammered the ground before it, the shockwave scattering several of the players from the MT group with varying amounts of damage and prompting them to rotate out for healing while one of the off-tank groups picked up the slack.
Once the line of defense had been established, Eugene began calling out orders. "Mage group 1, Earth attack on my mark!" That wasn't Tetsuo; he was in group 2 and Emberlock hadn't given him any specific instructions yet. He couldn't clearly hear the incantation over the cacophony of battle, but a barrage of stone spikes shot out from the other mage group, rapidly closing the distance and homing in on their target.
When they struck Hrungnir, they did so with a horrific din and an actinic crimson flash where the projectiles hit. As if someone had flipped an invisible switch, the rock shards reversed direction in an instant and sought out their point of origin. Before anyone could react, they shredded through the mage group on their way to converging on the hapless caster who'd unloaded the high-level spell. His HP went straight to red from his own critical hit, and panic threatened that corner of the raid as that group's healer hastened to restore them all.
"What the fuck?" Eugene yelled, very clearly. "What just happened?"
"It bounced his spell!" Came a shout from the group that had taken the hit.
"Red flash!" yelled someone else; Tetsuo thought it might've been Pyrin's voice. "The sequence changed; we need to use Fire instead this time!"
With the other mage group still focused on healing up, it fell to Emberlock's group to try their hands at the puzzle this time. The fireball that Tetsuo's temporary group leader cast did not get reflected back at them, much to everyone's relief. That relief was short-lived, however; the spell was absorbed with a flash of green, and almost immediately the Jotunn boss ignored the off-tank group holding its attention in favor of aggroing someone else. With horror, Tetsuo watched as the giant plowed through the raid, kicking aside any players who didn't evade quickly enough as it raged its way towards his group of mages.
Tetsuo wasn't specced as a hate tank, but he was the only person in the group geared for tanking at all—there was no one else to intercept the boss. With a shriek that was half-terror, half-defiance, he interposed himself between Hrungnir and Emberlock, planting himself and raising his shield. The force transferred when it met the mob's ethereal axe blade was enough to send Tetsuo sprawling backwards despite bracing for it, nearly a quarter of his HP gone just from blocking the attack head-on.
Before he could recover and get back to his feet, Tetsuo saw a sheath of rock form around one of the Jotunn's empty hands as it swung overhand. Emberlock had barely a moment to throw his hands up and scream before the fist completely crushed him, stoneware tiles spraying in every direction and the flames of the mage's Remain Light erupting from the shallow crater left by the blow.
While Tetsuo tried to gather himself back up to present a defense, one of the other mages panicked and blasted at the Jotunn with a bolt of flame. Again the shield flashed a bright forest-green color, and again the Jotunn sought out its assailant and focused solely on them until they were gone, ignoring anyone else.
Only moments had passed since the mob had torn into Tetsuo's group; he caught a glimpse of one of the off-tank groups maneuvering to try to regain aggro. But as soon as the second attacking mage expired, Hrungnir's vendetta against his group seemed to be done and it returned its attention to the tank groups that had already built up so much hate.
There was nothing he could do for the two who had fallen other than protect their healer while he tried to rez them. Considering the long cooldown timers on revival spells, Tetsuo was grateful when Eugene ordered the healer for one of the melee DPS groups to rez the second dead player, taking no chances on whether their own group's healer would have more than one rez spell to use.
The lesson of this near-disaster was clear even to Tetsuo: whoever landed an attack with the correct element would become the focus of the mob's hate. How the hell were they supposed to keep it from killing their mages? He felt bad for Emberlock and the others even as he saw their Remain Lights coalesce back into living avatars and their HP begin climbing back towards the green—those deaths were going to be costly for them in terms of progress.
As their group recovered, Tetsuo watched the first mage group take another shot at the puzzle mechanics. This time Eugene had positioned the main tank group directly in between the boss and the mage group, and as soon as a fireball rocketed out towards Hrungnir, the Salamander General bellowed, "Now Wind!"
Fire splashed across the boss, once again prompting a flare of green across the magic shield protecting it. And again, as expected, it immediately refocused its ire on the caster who'd struck it with the correct element, footsteps thundering across the open floor of its chambers as it covered ground with deceptive speed for something so gargantuan. Before it could get there, Tetsuo heard a word from a spell he thought he recognized, and several greenish-yellow arcs of energy slashed out from the mage group.
The shield didn't drop, and it didn't flash a new color. Instead it flashed red again, and the spinning blades of wind shot back towards the mage group, focused with narrow intensity on the mage who'd cast them. Only the timely intervention of one of the tanks saved him as the tank put himself in the path of the spell, being far more capable of taking that damage than the squishier caster. That didn't stop the boss, which sent the plate tank flying through the air as it kicked through him on its way to the mage group; he burst into flames as he struck the wall with overwhelming force.
Thankfully, the hate change didn't seem to be permanent—the combined efforts of the two groups' healers and the other mages in the group barely kept the mages alive long enough for the MT group to regain aggro and drag the boss away from the that group.
From the orders that came down next, Tetsuo could guess at what the problem had been—it wasn't just a matter of hitting the elements in the correct sequence, it was doing so in rapid succession. The colored flash from the shield when struck seemed to last for around half a second, and Eugene wanted the second attack to hit during the flash from the first one.
The mind reeled. Tetsuo couldn't imagine getting off a spell in under half a second after casting the last one—it would have to be two different casters, one starting their incantation immediately after the other did, trying to get the staggered timing just right.
It was insane. But that was what Eugene wanted them to do.
And it went about as well as Tetsuo expected. On the first several attempts, either the spells landed out of order, causing the effects to rebound on their casters, or they stumbled over the words as they tried to synchronize their timing, failing the spell. More players fell to the reflected damage and sudden shifts in aggro, and not all of them could be rezzed in time.
Tetsuo finally managed to land a Wind spell at exactly the right time, reasoning that if it didn't matter what spell he used, he'd use one with the shortest incantation he could think of, that would hurt the least if he got the timing wrong: his basic Wind Blast starter spell. When it struck, it produced a bright yellow flash and the boss immediately rushed him, making him extremely glad that he was a plate user who just happened to have some magic.
"Yellow!" That shout came from Eugene as OT 2 rushed in to try to help Tetsuo survive the short-term aggro from the boss. "Mage Group 1, Fire-Wind-Earth! Don't wait for the hate reset!"
In a stroke of luck, the timing of that barrage was nearly spot-on. Tetsuo's HP was very close to red when the boss suddenly lunged away from him and towards the other group, the third and last magic attack producing a blue flash from the shield. With a sinking feeling, Tetsuo realized what that had to mean.
Four arms… one hand that throws fire, one that uses a wind-based axe, a fist encased in stone for melee, and one that hasn't done anything yet… probably because it's Water, and we haven't hurt this thing yet.
There were times when you could almost smell doom in the air—when impending disaster created a stink that penetrated everything, sinking into every pore and filling you with dread certainty. Tetsuo had felt that the night before Kibaou's invasion of Everdark, and he'd felt it on more than one occasion when a raid went bad.
This one was going bad in a hurry. The main tank group was rotated out, low on HP and MP and waiting for potions and healers to do their work. Each off-tank group was assigned to a mage group, and both were barely keeping themselves in the green. Hrungnir plowed straight through the OT group guarding the other mage group, barely slowed by their attacks, and began laying waste to every mage who'd landed a successfully-timed hit, eliminating them one by one and dealing out damage too quickly for the healers to keep up, even with the help of the healers from the DPS groups standing by.
The groups began to fragment, as one by one players turned into purple or red Remain Lights and healers started running out of MP and more and more of their spells went on cooldown.
What began as a failure was rapidly turning into a total wipe. Eugene could see it as well as anyone, and before absolute chaos could break out, he made the call that Tetsuo thought he should've made half an hour ago: "Fall back to the entrance! No more attack spells of any kind, let the tank groups get aggro back and hold off the boss while we retreat!"
But the tank groups were having their own problems. OT 1's healer had died, and one of the healers in the MT group had exhausted all of their MP and potions, which left them with two healers to fend for three groups as everyone else began to flee. Several of the tanks were already in the red, and no one had HP anywhere near the comforting green zone that lay above 75% health.
It took every bit of courage Tetsuo possessed to not run as fast as his legs would carry him like the rest of the raid. The healer from Emberlock's group was right beside him, and before the man could run Tetsuo grabbed him by the collar of his robes and bodily whirled him around, propelling both of them towards the ailing tank groups. "Come on!"
"The hell with you!" yelled the Salamander healer, twisting loose and giving Tetsuo a shove that didn't budge him but made their positions clear. Too shocked and disgusted to waste time putting forth an effort to stop someone that he couldn't make cast his healing spells anyway, Tetsuo ran headlong towards the tank groups and the certain death that he was trying very hard not to think about. It wasn't until he was halfway there that he heard footsteps beside him, and saw Heathcliff rushing in the same direction with his shield held out before him. Both of them were in the yellow, but the look on Heathcliff's face was resolute and unwavering.
An indescribable emotion filled Tetsuo then—something that wasn't worship, but could've easily passed for it. He'd always trusted and respected his group leader, but never so much as he did in that moment as the two of them threw themselves into the fray, weapons and shields stopping blows that would've ended more than one of their comrades. The stakes fueled him with desperate energy and speed, but even that didn't even come close to matching the performance that Heathcliff put on. His shield was almost a blur at times, and although the attacks from the massive Jotunn pushed his HP lower and lower by slivers, virtually nothing moved him, and eventually the boss began focusing all of its attention on the player who had become its biggest aggravation.
"Go," his group leader urged, silver ponytail whipping around when he swung his arm to deflect Hrungnir's axe, the metal of his enchanted kite shield giving off an agonized whine as the blow turned with a flash of dispersed green energy. "Get them to safety, Tetsuo. Go now!"
It was a measure of his loyalty to his group leader that he didn't immediately obey. Instead, he hesitated for a moment, and in that moment a flurry of conflicting thoughts and motivations went through his head: his trust in Heathcliff, his desire to save his friends, despair at the thought of leaving his group leader to carry out what was almost certainly a sacrifice play, and a shamefully-felt urge to get his own self to safety.
Loyalty won out with an assist from self-preservation. "Come on, everyone!" Tetsuo called out, pulling one of the surviving healers to his feet and shoving an MP potion into his hand. "Heathcliff's going to keep it held off here; don't waste this chance!"
As he turned with the last survivors of the tank groups and began their retreat, Tetsuo spared one last glance back over his shoulder. Heathcliff stood alone against the giant, turning the axe-blade with his sword and triggering one of his shield bash techniques to redirect a crushing blow from the Jotunn's stone-clad fist.
The last thing Tetsuo saw before disappearing around the corner was Heathcliff's HP bar flashing once before turning red.
Author Note 11/28/13: Well, my progress this month has been less stellar than I would've liked, but now that life is starting to settle down a bit for me I'm finding my muse returning. So... yay! The return of Klein, the 25th gateway boss massacre, a longer chapter and a whole lot of groundwork-laying, obvious and otherwise. As always, chime in with a review and let me know what you think!