Collide Gamer

John gave the field around them a wide look.

There really was nothing besides red sand in the arena. It was expansive as well, which was good and bad news. This much space wouldn’t be needed if there wouldn’t be any Area of Attack shenanigans. The rıghtful source is 𝓷𝓸𝓿𝓮𝓵※𝖿𝗂𝗋𝖾※𝙣𝙚𝙩

John narrowed the scope of his mental projection to the immediate area around the halfling for the rest of the planning. “Metra, you are taking point. Ehtra, Nahoa, I want you two to position yourself symmetrically behind the boss. Nahoa, you specifically, will remain stationary and build up your cloud. Keep your mind open so we can access your sensory data. I’ll give you follow-up orders once we know how much this boss moves.”

“Affirmative,” Nahoa said, a bloodthirsty grin on her lips.

“Scarlett, you’ll position yourself behind Metra. You’re to enter the melee second. Momo, Claire, you will spread out left and right of Scarlett. Your function will be ranged support through summons and shields. Sylph, you are staying far away until we scout out the basic mechanics. Fianna, you will be staying very far away and provide damage bursts on my signal, set yourself up for that moment.”

“”Affirmative,”” the crowd of maids answered.

“Roger, roger!” Sylph babbled.

Scarlett’s mechanical tail smacked the ground. A short break was all she had needed to put on her brass combat limbs and change from her suit into a red unitard. “Let’s get to it.”

Everyone walked to their assigned positions. John was quite excited to see how this would go. It was not just the first time that Fianna joined them for any kind of Dungeon, it was also the debut of Scarlett and Nahoa in this setting. It would be very interesting to see how they would fare and how Nahoa’s diseases interacted with Raid bosses’ intense resistance to crowd control.

Metra took one more look over her shoulder, then ritualistically moved the heavy head of Rex Magnar behind herself. Bend legs and straight back formed her posture, perfect for the swing that came. The back of her Fusional weapon exploded into a pillar of plasma, fire and thunder intertwining.

Even the First of Wrath could only guide that force. Her arms became the axis, the stabilizing factor of a semi-circle swing. Enchantments increased the weight of the weapon several-fold, amplifying the force of the descent that then slammed into the halfling’s head.

“OUCH!” yelled the Raid boss.

A force to break the earth shook the indestructible Raid environment. The halfling was flung back, skipping over sand like a flat stone over a serene pond. Possessing the extreme reflexes and sturdiness to be a challenge to the nine of them, the unimpressive appearing shortie caught himself, then charged right back at Metra.

‘Seems like the simple aggro type,’ John thought. ‘Attacks either the nearest target or whoever dealt the most damage to it recently, provided they are close enough to reach quickly.’

They all held their positions until Go-Hi had re-engaged Metra in the melee. Without the power of the Extreme Plasma Burst, the Breaker of Armies was driven back by the Raid boss within a couple of stabs. She let the first pass, to test the durability of her armour against the plain dagger. When it pierced the Astrotium, she opted to dodge backwards. The shortness of the enemy made parrying him quite a bother.

“Good attack, very good attack!” Go-Hi complimented, still smiling.

The Raid boss did not acknowledge the flutter of red hair behind him. With the grace of a ballerina and the bloodlust of a shark, Scarlett had charged around Metra and Go-Hi. She lunged, her outstretched claw glowing with heat. Lightning crackled up and down the metal limb.

Even the full impact of the digits only had Go-Hi stumble forwards half a step. The back of his head was singed lightly, but that was all there was to show for the attack itself.

Metra and Scarlett kept the boss entangled in a melee for ten seconds before John sent Ehtra in as well. Nahoa went after that, bringing her noxious cloud with her.

John kept a very close eye on the boss as the pathogens entered his lungs. There was a, however tiny, decrease in his speed. ‘Effectiveness is probably decreased by somewhere in the realm of 90%,’ he thought. He was pulling that number entirely out of his ass. It was just the kind of mechanic he would put in place to prevent his Raid bosses from getting made into a laughing stock by getting their Stats curbed every encounter.

The first boss mechanic was unceremoniously revealed when Go-Hi landed a stab against Metra. The speed of the enemy made him landing the occasional strike an inevitability. Even if he had proven capable of cutting through Astrotium, slicing Metra’s entire front open with one attack was a bit much.

“Crit!” Go-Hi yelled excitedly.

Simultaneously, Metra opened a portal beneath her, dropping through and landing next to John at a relatively safe distance. The dagger had carved deep enough that the First of Wrath had almost been split diagonally.

“Crit!” the boss yelled again just a few seconds later, stabbing Nahoa with such force that the axolotl’s insides splattered all over the ground. Barely an inconvenience for the demigoddess, whose HP regeneration and restoration factor were high even for an Artificial Spirit. The two were closely linked stats. One reflected the recovery of the vitality needed to heal and the other was the speed at which that recovery became a physical reality.

‘So can he just crit randomly or is it pseudo-random?’ John asked himself. A great many games over the years had gone with the latter in order to give critical hits a degree of consistency. There were several approaches for pseudo-crits. The one John was most familiar with had each consecutive attack gain a bit more crit chance, exceeding what was on paper, until a crit was actually guaranteed, at which point it would reset to a number lower than the displayed crit chance. The goal of such systems was to nudge a 25% chance to Crit from ‘a fourth of all attacks are critical’ to ‘every fourth hit is critical’. Some variance remained in such systems to keep up the fantasy of critical hits, however.

John would have to continue to observe in order to run that statistical analysis.

60 seconds into the fight, Go-Hi suddenly stopped his attack. “I need to go pray real quick!” he announced and bolted in Fianna’s direction.

‘Permission to shoot, Sir?’ she asked.

‘Denied, I want to observe the mechanic.’

Go-Hi stopped in a seemingly random spot of the arena and dropped to his knees. “Great Skywhale and the Skywhale and the Skywhale and the Skywhale and Skywhale,” he prayed. It was an odd mantra of worship, but it certainly did something.

With the audible cry of a blue whale, a gargantuan whale swam through the sky above, its body illuminated by magically sparking clouds. Its snout pushed ahead of its bulk a massive, floating rock.

As it went by, down on the arena floor some areas of the red sand began to swirl. It was a soft turbulence, too weak to be more than a bother, and the sand miraculously did not rise above a specific level in height.

‘Those look like ‘stand here’ circles,’ John thought and had his party move to occupy one of the circles each. There were exactly nine of them, so that was another hint that this was the proper plan of action.

Nothing happened. The Skywhale just drifted by above, Go-Hi jumped back to his feet, and the fight continued from there.

A third mechanic was revealed soon thereafter.

“This fight requires a little… spice!” the redheaded elf yelled and jumped onto the railing. A sphere of red magic formed between her hands, crackling and bursting, crystals forming and grinding up against each other endlessly.

The elf pulled a hand and the sphere back, then swung it upwards. It turned into a singular spike of blood ruby. A segment of the arena began to glow a baleful red. John did not need to utter an evacuation order for everyone who was in the affected area to swiftly vacate the premises.

A couple of seconds later, a gracious time period by every metric, the ground erupted into a thousand sharp pillars of blood-red rubies. They were dozens of metres high, introducing an area completely impassable. When Sylph tried to fly over it, she was cut down by a spell from the god in his throne.

“Fleeing the arena is a dishonourable path,” he complained.

‘Would have liked a little more warning on where the boundaries are set here,’ John complained to Gaia.

Sylph being down barely mattered. Like most first attempts went, they were getting choked out of resources. The boss’ DPS was simply more than the regenerative factor of the Artificial Spirits, even with some basic aggro juggling. Playing cautiously let them experience the mechanics, but it didn’t let them actually win.

Their first attempt ended after roughly seven minutes.

John was in a good mood in the strategy meeting thereafter. “We are dealing with very simple mechanics,” he told everyone. “First off, the critical hit comes in every 10 swings, roughly. Variance puts it in the range of 8 to 12, from what I have seen. If you dodge the strike, that doesn’t matter, it will be the next successful hit in that range that will trigger the crit. In other words, we can just coordinate who takes the crit if we time things correctly. Nahoa, Metra, Nahoa, Ehtra, repeat, that’ll be the order of taking the crits. I will adjust on the fly if Ehtra gets very good lifesteal healing done.”

The addressed trio nodded.

“As per the Skywhale mechanic, it seems that we are preventing whatever could happen by standing on the spots. We can continue doing this without issue. Lastly, the Saintesses weighing in… that one is a bit more complicated.”

Before they had wiped, a second one of Vokal’s women had mingled with the fight. It had been the lamia that time, who had covered a part of the battlefield in a sandstorm. Checking on it had revealed that there was a massive red-scaled snake in it as well, just to make it extra deadly.

“I can’t understand it yet, not with any certainty.”

“Seems pretty unsportsmanlike for the viewers to weigh in so openly,” Nahoa complained. She had been the one to get chomped by the snake.

John shrugged. “Other places, other customs.”

They were back in the tumble quickly. The second attempt on the boss went well. John continued to play it with an abundance of caution, considering that there must have been a second phase or something. That, combined with their tanks needing to figure out their footwork, led to their second wipe. The issue was Nahoa, and Metra told that to the demigoddess flatly. Her part in this was to take every second crit, but her coordination with the Metracanas was lacking. It had led to Ehtra having aggro for a hit more than she could take and the failure cascaded from there.

Nahoa took the criticism on the chin. Attempts 3 and 4 saw her teamwork improve drastically. The three tanks of the encounter executed their swaps between each other with less and less wasted time, which directly translated into more damage on the boss, as the DPS had more reliable windows of opportunity to strike.

Scarlett had been adapted well from the start. The technomancer had so much combat data stored inside her pointy ear-implants that she fought as if she had always been part of the Raid.

Fianna was the other one who made marked improvements in teamplay as they went along.

‘Reaching maximum Aim in 15 seconds,’ she announced through the mental network. Two pieces of metal slammed against one another above her head, hard enough that the resulting sound echoed over the field. Not only did this also warn Scarlett, the only member not in the network, but it also served to warn everyone about the direction from which the Cardinal Chosen was about to fire. ‘Timing bullet to strike with the tank swap Metra to Nahoa.’

‘Good,’ Metra answered mentally.

Seconds ticked by. Go-Hi swung his dagger repeatedly at the First of Wrath. On the 8th swing, she stood her ground. The attack was regular, as was the one that followed – then the halfling dagger suddenly became a weapon of utter devastation. Metra was carved open, her metal insides bared.

The sound of the sniper rifle echoed in the arena as if a tank had just fired its main turret. A follow-up stab by the halfling was halted by the bullet’s stopping power. In the gap of motion created, Nahoa plunged her dagger down at Go-Hi’s neck. The boss’ attention did not switch.

The dagger penetrated through the tough skin and into the nerves and arteries below. “Oh shit!” he managed to gurgle, then collapsed where he stood. His body, as was usual for Instant Dungeon enemies, turned into grey dust a moment later.

“The outsiders have won their first fight!” Vokal announced. “The lowest hurdle has been cleared! Many more are yet to follow!”

The crowd cheered, the pride of their world apparently secondary to the enjoyment of a good spectacle. Even the halflings present didn’t seem to care too much that one of their own had just been ganged up on and turned into powder.

‘Just the unrealistic parts of Raids,’ John thought. ‘Not that I mind those.’

Why would he, when a chest manifested from thin air for him?