Past midnight, Underground Root Complex respawn point...

Rose went limp and crumpled onto the floor. She couldn't feel her blood pumping but a certain sense of adrenaline was still coursing through her. After a moment of dazed blinking, she looked at the corner of vision. Her health bar had only a sliver left. A defeated groan escaped from her lips as she realized what happened.

"Stupid tail swipe," she cursed under her breath. "If I were a little bit more careful... less careless... less greedy..."

As she trailed off, she noticed movement in the health bars of the members of her party. One of the health bars became almost fully depleted. Rose sat up and looked around.

There was the unique flash of the game's teleport animation and suddenly Milou Akuou popped into existence in the middle of the room. She stood in a defensive stance with her shield still raised for a moment before collapsing. Rose crawled over to her fallen party member.

"You okay?" Rose asked, putting a comforting hand on Milou's shoulder. The lancer blinked, looking a little stunned. "Death felt more shocking than I expected," she mumbled.

Rose hummed in agreement, recalling the moment she died. In the instant that her health bar depleted, all of her senses just shut down, leaving her in a disembodied darkness where the only thing she could see was a text box saying [You are dead. Respawing in 5 seconds...]. When the count down reached zero, she respawned in the same pose she died in, her senses hitting her all at once.

"So, how'd you go out?"

Milou released a deep sigh. "An attack from the boss broke my shield. I tried to equip my back-up but I wasn't fast enough. It killed me before I was able to put it up to block." She then chuckled. "What makes things worse is that this is the second time in as many weeks that one of my shields broke."

Rose nodded awkwardly, unsure of how to respond. "Well... That sucks..."

"How about you?"

"I mistimed one of my tech cooldowns and my weapon just bounced right off it. It did a tail sweep while I was in the recoil animation that did double damage. My health went from yellow to dead in one attack."

Milou nodded thoughtfully before closing her eyes. "I'm not looking forward to fighting that thing again."

Rose watched as the health bars of the rest of her party depleted all at once. She shook her head. "Yeah... Me neither..."

Earlier, deep within the Underground Root Complex...

Looming over Myrtenaster was a twelve foot high stone door with glowing carved markings depicting some sort of multi-legged monster. It was so obviously a boss door that the she almost laughed. She also nearly screamed in outrage as the implications of that particular kind of boss door were not lost on her.

Boss doors were a common occurrence in Remnant Online. Out in the field, they tended to be naturally formed in the terrain like an opening to a dense ring of trees around a clearing or the entrance to a cave. Those kind of boss doors lead to field bosses - usually a named version of a field mob with higher stats and additional attacks and abilities.

The door before her was not one of those kinds of doors. She had seen only one of them before and the memory of it was still burned into her skull.

Next to her, Milou spoke calmly but warily, "Myrtenaster... you know what this is, right...?"

Myrtenaster pursed her lips and nodded. There was not a doubt in her mind. The Underground Root Complex was the region 2 Gate Dungeon.

"Were going in," Myrtenaster said, opening her messaging window. "I'm calling Rose. When they get here, we're fighting the boss"

"They were moving in the opposite direction from us. It'll take them some time to get here."

"We can wait." Myrtenaster turned to Wilting Blush who was holding up a torch. "How many torches do we still have?"

Wilt took a moment to bring up his inventory and check. "We have eight minutes on the torch that's currently lit and exactly one hundred in reserve."

"Over fifty hours of fire light," Myrtenaster said with a smile. "Plenty of time for them to get here."

Later...

As it turned out, the wait wasn't very long. Just over fifteen minutes after Myrtenaster sent the message, Rose's group came into view at the far end of the tunnel. No sooner had they reached the boss door and began prepping for the upcoming boss fight.

"You know we're gonna lose, right?" Rose said as she switched out her spear for her scythe. "But then again, we have a free revive. I guess we're just scouting?"

Myrtenaster rolled her eyes, unsheathing her rapier. "That's the plan," she muttered as she moved to open the boss room.

The ground trembled as the stone doors turned inward, a terrible rumble echoing though the cave. When it stopped, an empty stillness seemed to take over. Their flames were put out and the frantic pitter-patter of the Scramblers surrounding them also stopped, as if the mobs just disappeared. All that remained were the ambient noises of the cave.

"Is everyone ready?" Myrtenaster whispered as they slowly walked into the boss arena. Her voice carried farther and louder than she expected.

As they all gave their confirmations, a gust of wind rushed at them, somehow closing the door behind them. They all turned to Maggy who was the last to enter. "Is it too late to say I'm not ready?" she asked nervously.

Myrtenaster ignored the halfhearted quip and readied her weapon. "I don't see the boss yet. It might try to blindside us. Everyone form up." With that order, Rose, Maggy, and Milou pulled ahead, everyone else following shortly behind them.

Myrtenaster wasn't sure how she'd describe the boss arena. In a way, it look just like the rest of the Root Complex. It was a cavernous room filled with a patchwork of architecture, from centuries old stone masonry to rotted wooden planks, blending into each other seemingly at random. And creeping up all around the room, on the ground, the floor, the ceiling, and every ruined support pillar was a gnarled tangle of roots emitting an ethereal golden glow.

"The roots make the floor dangerously uneven," Milou noted. "Be careful not to lose your footing."

"At least we can't get sprained ankles in the game," Rose mumbled.

They continued moving forward at a slow and steady pace, the tense silence only broken by the sound of their footsteps.

"Might just be me but doesn't it feel like we're walking into some kind of trap?" Rose asked.

"It's not just you," Myrtenaster replied. She also felt like she was walking into a trap. The boss arena was empty and had closed without warning. The boss itself hadn't even shown up yet. There was obviously a trap. The only question was, had they already fallen for it?

"Gambol, detection."

There was a noticeable flash in Gambol's eyes as she activated the ability. Everyone held their breath as Gambol looked around. When she finally spoke, she said, "Nothing. I scanned the whole room but there's nothing to see. It's empty."

There was a pause.

"That doesn't make sense," Myrtenaster growled in frustration. "What do you mean there's nothing? The boss has to be here somewhere."

"The boss probably is here," Milou calmly pointed out, "but the game's not letting us see it. It might be a scripted sequence - like some sort of cinematic boss introduction."

Myrtenaster's scowl deepened. "So this is an unskippable cutscene?"

"Hmm. More like a section of gameplay before a cutscene. We have to trigger it first before it plays. We just don't know what the trigger is."

Even Rose groaned this time. "This room is huge. We could spend hours trying to find-"

She wasn't able to finish her sentence as she tripped over a glowing root. The ground began shaking shortly after.

They all went wide-eyed. "That's the trigger," Rose said, scrambling back to her feet. "Everyone scatter!"

Erupting from the ground was a thing that would probably plague Myrtenaster's dreams in the coming nights. Towering over her was the [Root Death Stalker], a giant black and white scorpion with blood red markings. It was the size of a bus, not even including the pincers, legs and tail with a golden glowing stinger. The sheer look of it was intimidating, made even more so by the three health bars and the large Level 80 next to its name.

She was lost in awe and fear for less than a second before she remembered that she was still technically party leader. After a quick glance at her mini map to get herself situated, she then began barking her orders, the system-assisted [Strategic Targeting] already pinging Milou and Rose to attack and gain aggro.

After a few moments of disorganization, her party managed to settle into their roles. Rose and Milou were tanking. Stormflower stayed back and provided consistent DPS with his bow and arrows. The rest would circle around the boss and attack when there was an opening.

They kept at the fight for as long as they could but it was clear from that start that they weren't going to win. It became more and more certain as the fight went on. Non-sword techniques from anyone other than Maggy seemed to just bounce off the thing's armored exoskeleton, dealing reduced damage. It also hit like a truck, removing large chunks of their health bars from mere glancing blows. Their team work wasn't nearly good enough to carry them through the entire fight, nor were their potion reserves.

They survived for ten minutes before they wiped out. The boss had lost slightly less than 10% of its heath by the time the last player fell.

Pathetic.

Even with all that said, though, Myrtenaster wouldn't say that the [Root Death Stalker] was an unfairly difficult boss. Aside from an absurdly high health pool and damage output, most of its attacks had long wind-ups, limited range, or both. The only exception would be a tail sweep and charge attack, both of which had short wind ups but only seemed to trigger in specific instances.

There was no doubt in Myrtenaster's mind that someone would be able to solo the boss if they had perfect dodge timing and the patience to whittle away at it for hours until it died. Really, it was just test of endurance.

Of course, the thing had three health bars and their party of seven wasn't even close to taking out of the first bar. Based on experience, bosses would get more aggressive and start using new attacks with every depleted bar. She could only assume that the Death Stalker was no different.

They were gonna have to try again and Myrtenaster was not looking forward to trying again...

REMNANT ONLINE

Party Stats

Leader
Myrtenaster Lv 37 (elapsed time in party: 84:38)

Members
Gambol Shroud Lv 40 (elapsed time in party: 84:38)
Wilting Blush Lv 39 (elapsed time in party: 84:37)
Milou Akuou Lv 44 (elapsed time in party: 84:37)
Crescent Rose Lv 56 (elapsed time in party: 77:21)
Magnhild Lv 45 (elapsed time in party: 83:59)
Stormflower Lv 43 (elapsed time in party: 83:58)

REMNANT ONLINE

It's been a long time. How have you been? I've been real busy being dead. Ironically, I've been dead because of life. The entire three months I was on hiatus was the tail end of the school year. I had to deal with final exams, project completion, all that stuff. Terrible. Simply terrible.

But that doesn't really matter since I'm back now with this chapter

Before I started work on this chapter proper, I made what was basically as a very large list with accompanying explanations for game mechanics that were going to be relevant soon. I was struggling to put some of them into the story in a way that made sense and ended up shelving most of my game mechanics notes for a future chapter. That being said, I barely made any headway into converting those notes into story so... that future chapter I was talking about? It might turn into future chapters...

The first scene is literally the first scene I wrote for this story since the last update. Character death is a rare occurrence in this story and considering the in-universe safety-net I wrote into the story to let them die with little consequence, I might as well throw some deaths in there. It was more interesting than just having them run away again which was my original plan.

The scenes that followed were written in two quick bursts of mostly just me churning out some words to be edited later. I only really want to point out two things. Firstly, the inspiration for the boss room is once again from Dark Souls, namely the room where you fight against the Demon Fire Sage. It looks essentially the same as what I described in this chapter, minus the glowing roots and patchwork architecture. Secondly, I briefly mentioned a new mechanic called [Strategic Targeting] which pings party members to do certain combat actions like attack or retreat. Since it's system-assisted, it automatically activates when a contextual action is performed. In this case, the contextual action is shouting commands at party members.

And the final part of the chapter is the Player Stats. Except it's not Player Stats. Instead, it's Party Stats. At the current level they're at, all the characters will have pretty much the same tier of equipment and most used skills. I thought it'd be better to show the levels in Myrtenaster's party in comparison to each other. Player Stats will return next chapter if only because there are still characters with different equipment that I haven't talked about yet.

Anyway, I hope you all enjoyed this chapter. If you have anything to say about it, feel free to leave a review. Until the next chapter.