Collide Gamer

“City Elementals, Feral, Forest Elementals, Ogres, Orcs or Undead,” John read out the selection to present company.

Since he did not have to deal with a group size limitation this time around, said company was large. Everyone who he thought would be of help in the upcoming defensive scenario was present. That included the elementals, as per usual, and several of his Artificial Spirits – Claire, Momo, Nahoa and Fianna, specifically. Of the other haremettes, Lydia and Nia had joined. Those two, in combination with Fianna, would be the single target DPS to take down the boss monsters, while most everyone else was much better at holding the ground of their fortification.

So, there were 11 women, 1 man, and 1 crocodile. A typical force for John’s endeavours.

“Doing City Elementals again would get tiresome,” Salamander said, to universal groans and eyerolls. “…What?”

Undine shook her head. “I refuse to believe that one was accidental.”

“I am still- OH, because the enemies were tires!” Salamander laughed at her own pun. “I am a genius!”

“Tires make for poor targets.” Fianna was pushing and pulling various parts of her sniper rifle, testing the smoothness of it all. The Legendary weapon was attached to her by the usual means of cables and tubes. “If I may make the request, I wish to fight Ogres, Sir.”

“Any reason why, beyond them being big targets?” John asked.

“It is my opinion that they will make for the most aggressive and individually powerful enemies. That makes them the best target for training on how to handle new Abyssals that have awoken to a brutish variety of Innate Ability.”

Lydia nodded. “Tactical. I agree with her assessment.”

“Not sure if dozens to hundreds of brutish people would ever blindly charge into our fortified location...” John rubbed his chin, then shrugged “…but that is as good a justification for a pick as any. Anyone got an alternative idea?”

No one spoke up and thus the decision was made.

The Instant Dungeon appeared around them. As so often with Orcs and Ogres, the base of the landscape was a wavy, green plain. Grass and rocks were all that the ground had to offer – at least on the surface.

The ogres of this setting had erected massive oil pumps. Magi-tech spires covered in runes pumped the black gold out of the ground. It ran down the sides in great streams, gathering in pools of tar and crude oil. It was sprayed into the air in a fine mist, feeding flames that turned each of the oil pumps into a torch that lit the night. The heat of all of that fire hit John like a physical impact.

Their first enemy stepped out into the red-gold light. It was a true hulk of muscle and fat, a barrel of a humanoid – an industrial beer barrel, to be more precise. The monster was five metres tall, with skin black and glistening like rubber, and yellowed, jagged teeth too large to be contained by stretched lips. Red paint had been smacked onto it in tribalistic fashions, mimicking the many shades of flames in its faded and fresh pigments.

‘I doubt they’re that strong in their Kingdom, but it does say ‘inspired’ not ‘copied’, so I can hardly put that insinuation at Gaia’s feet.’

The creature grabbed a massive stone bowl and dunked it deep into the closest oil lake. Thick oil dripped in long strings from the arm and bowl, as the ogre raised it to his mouth. Gulp by gulp, he downed the crude liquid.

“BLUUUARRGH!” It came shooting back up, congealed into a sticky ball. It arched through the air, heading for the group.

Gnome stamped her foot down. A segment of the ground rushed up. Dirt turned to smooth stone, oil splattered on the polished surface, and John’s mana flowed to the season elemental. More walls swiftly followed, blocking the bombarding belches of other ogres.

“Let’s not put up a lava moat given these circumstances,’ John decided. “These guys absolutely have fire resistance, so it’d just be a waste of mana. Salamander, can you try to blow up one of these towers?”

“On it!” The apocalypse elemental took to the sky, the roof of their bunker shaping up behind her.

Through his mental eye, John followed her ascent. She stopped twenty metres above the ground. Additional arms sprouted from the black armour granted by her Tier 5.5 upgrade. All three right hands together formed a cage around a gathering of energy. Flame wed with stone into a sphere of destruction.

Salamander barely restrained her urge to empower the sphere beyond her Unleash. A test should not contain all of her potential, just enough to measure if the task was reasonably doable.

The meteor was hurled like a baseball, leaving multi-coloured fire in its wake. It splattered the attack of a monster on its way, igniting the oil. Salamander’s excitement at the spread of flame was palpable. It was like a molten flower bloomed in mid-air, fading in the same second the meteor slammed into the base of the oil tower.

Disappointingly, the attack shattered against the side of the pump. There was no damage, just pools of oil that ignited. It did nothing to deter the ogres from dunking their bowls into them and drinking the thick fluid.

‘So that was a bust,’ Salamander thought.

‘You’re on frontline duty then,’ John told her. ‘You can poke and pummel them to death, right?’

‘Who the hell do you think I am? I’m going to tear them a new one!’ Read complete versıon only at novèlfire.net

Salamander dove down, herself now a meteor. Her heel crashed into the side of a charging ogre’s head. The creature, with all of its mass, stumbled backwards. Deep red blood poured from the gash on its hairless temple. It roared, then resumed its charge.

BAM!

The roar of the sniper rifle echoed in the landscape. Where the head of the Worldtorch Ogre had been, there was not only a fleshy stump. It dissolved rapidly into ash and dust.

‘I didn’t need the assist!’ it echoed through the mental connection.

‘He was in my Aim,’ Fianna responded simply.

‘Bah, listen to the soldier gal, she is making sense!’

It was all good natured banter, the usual that echoed through their connections and, during quieter moments, was spoken aloud.

The only quiet in the entire battlefield was around John. Sitting on a bench that Gnome had made for him, he followed the events of the battlefield through other eyes. His familiars, in their multiple positions, and the hovering Ego Blades that he, these days, favoured over sending out the Mandala Sphere.

‘It’s just nicer to work with disposable tools,’ he thought. From a conversation with the crafting crew, he knew that it took them about an hour to craft a set of 4 Ego Blades. They weren’t big fans of going through the same project over and over again, so he tried not to get them melted.

Still, the work of (effectively) 15 minutes being lost was much better than the Mandala Sphere, which was the work of days

Ego Blades in the sky were just a steady point of reference, to anchor the other streams of perception and create a full map of the battlefield. In doing this, he provided all of the combatants in his mental network a level of awareness over the flow of things that itself was worth dedicating himself to. That awareness indirectly boosted those that were not part of the mental network as well, since his other haremettes still had complete trust that every move had a reason and acted accordingly.

War was won by blood and intel. Instant Dungeons were just little wars against an enemy with a lot of blood and very little intel.

Gnome expanded the fortress bit by bit. For once they went with a water moat, fed by Undine, who had to ceaselessly pour water over the roof of the bunker to prevent it from turning into an oven. The ogres were bombarding them with oil and then ignited it whenever they could. They weren’t quite as mindless as the usual variant of Wave enemy either. They usually attacked in formations of at least three and had a basic understanding of the idea of supportive fire.

Still, the first Wave came and went with the usual degree of fluid execution.

The boss at the end was a four-armed, two-headed fire giant. It was about what John had expected. The fight that followed was a case of predictable excitement. They knew they would win, but it took enough of an effort to get them in that nice flow state.

The second wave went much like the first, with just a bit of extra strain.

The third one kicked them in the proverbial balls.

‘Another hole, Gnome!’ Claire reported.

‘I KNOW! S-sorry for shouting…’ The agitated season elemental had her hands on the wall, constantly feeling the structure and all of its damage. Mana flowed from John to her in a constant stream. All of his regeneration and then some went to her. If he didn’t have to fight a Raid in the next couple of days, he might have activated an Overclock.

Two tiers above the recommended, the ogre’s oil balls were strong enough to crack the stone. Rather than send one of the haremettes against one monster, they were sending two, sometimes three. The consequence was that there were ogre squads that repeatedly busted into the fortress, left to roam around.

John had left the fortress a while ago.

The Gamer was running up the side of an oil tower. The Skitterstep’s Adhesive Soles were a rarely used but always appreciated feature of his favourite shoes. One of the ogres leapt, attempting to swat him with its massive hand like a man would a bothersome moth.

Magus Step delivered John from harm. The Skill was his lifeline. He was running a desperate marathon from death using one of the oldest tricks in the book.

In every game with endless scaling, there came a point where the enemies simply dealt too much damage to be tanked directly. Gamers across multiple franchises had found solutions to this problem, be it temporary invulnerability, instant death effects, or glitches. One way to deal with this problem, a very common one, was to kite.

John would have gotten killed in one to three attacks, depending on his mana at the time. Thus, what he needed to do was to never, ever, be clipped at all. With Magus Step and Skitterstep, he was a slippery bastard. This fact, he used to its full ability.

Sylph and Siena played the same game. The three of them gathered the attention of as many Worldtorch Ogres as possible and then just ran for it. Nia, Lydia, Salamander and Fianna then picked off whoever they could. In the middle of the battlefield, Gnome, Claire, Undine and Nahoa continued to hold down the fort.

This strategy would have never worked were this an Assault. In a scenario of endlessly spawning enemies, they would have eventually slipped up and failed. The margin of error was just too tight to play it forever. In a Wave, however, there was a finite amount of enemies. Once everything had spawned, things began to thin out. As things thinned, the margin of error got more gracious.

Then, the boss spawned.

It was Tier 160 – it was a Core Wave.

Every 5th Tier was a capstone of some kind, had been when he had run these things regularly. They had been different from the preceding Tiers, be it through enemies, level design, bosses, or all of the above. John had not interacted with the mechanic for long enough that he had hoped Gaia had forgotten about it.

John swiped the window aside as he ran. The ground beneath him trembled and broke open. The massive oil tower he had just jumped from to get away from the last cluster of ogres trembled. Tons upon tons of earth burst into the air as a creature made from flowing oil moved to the surface.

It was a mixture of lizard and centipede. Its long body possessed too many clawed legs to count. Its surface hardened into asphalt, which cracked into scales. Fire continued to pour from the many oil towers that now extended from the back of the creature like dorsal spikes. It roared, spreading black gold everywhere.

A spark set the breath aflame. The explosive consumption of all of that fuel caused a shockwave that had John thrown backwards. Particle Skin had gone deactivated. All of that mana was needed elsewhere.

The boss monster was easily two-hundred metres from its smooth head to the base of its tail, a tail that was, like an iguana’s, more than the length of the body.

“[Obliteration].”

The wave of heat had its successor in a wave of chills. Physical chills, without any drop in temperature, caused only by the word whose absence etched itself in his ear canals. Nia’s strike connected near the head of the boss monster.

It was more than super effective. The void type always worked best against these fully supernatural entities. The sword, blacker than oil, unmade much of the liquid, then sent the whole monster into a set of spasms.

Everyone capitalized on the situation. None mattered more than Nahoa. The axolotl maid repeatedly drove Nextloaolli into the hide of the beast, applying and worsening her diseases and the enchantments on the Mythical dagger. Momo swung the Witch Blade, the Eldritch Plight Attribute further accelerating and advancing any debuffs placed on the enemy.

The combination of factors was no instant win. What it did was drag the Stats of the creature down enough that, when it regained control over itself, its Stats had dropped enough to be a doable encounter.

The boss monster tilted its head back, sending an flame pillar up into the sky. It tilted to the side, following something only it could see. ‘World Disease putting in the work,’ John thought.

They waited until the breath attack had run its course, then launched another unified offensive. A prismatically shimmering wrecking ball slammed into the side of the monster’s face. Lydia shouted, physically guiding her magical powers by swinging her fist through the air simultaneously.

Staggered, the boss stumbled back. It was just a few steps at first, but Sylph kept it retreating. The volt bunny leapt and leapt again, side to side, each time striking the boss with the force of a thunderstorm.

Together, Salamander and Gnome leapt into the fray. They each caught an edge of the boss’ maw, dragging it with them. Stretching backwards, the creature bent and bent – until its force proved more than theirs. The momentum began to reverse.

John had anticipated this. A golden egg was already flying, Unleashing into a draconic crocodile that slammed into the exposed throat of the boss monster. It was the weight and power, not a bite, that delivered Stirwin’s contribution. The head of the oil monster was forced the rest of the way back, impaling its liquid skull on one of its own dorsal spikes.

Confused, disoriented, but not dead, the creature tossed and turned. A cacophony of melodies overpowered the destructive shouts of the creature. A ball of tendrils and aggression wrapped around the upper segment of the boss, a multitude of mouths and crimson eyes testament to Undine’s controlled madness.

The top part of the enormous boss was pinned. Its many legs skittered aimlessly. Its tail, however, had enough accuracy left. A whip the size of a skyscraper came down at them at a speed that could have cleaved an island in two.

BAM!

The sniper shot struck the thin tail, blasting the tip off. The whipping impact still made the earth tremble, but none were directly hit by the horrific kinetic force.

“KEEP IT STILL!” John shouted.

“Thank you for the obvious,” Siena hissed back, just loud enough to be heard. The shadow spirit had joined Undine, wrapping bindings of darkness around the creature to keep it from moving. Claire’s household was piling and on.

Silver.

An Arcane Ascension had been poured into Skyfall. The spell hit the head of the creature with enough force that the simulation broke. Not only was the boss annihilated, the damage to the landscape was so absolute that, after the light of the explosion faded, they found themselves back in the black of the Intermediary Barrier.

‘That’s never happened before,’ John thought. He pulled up the Quest window really quickly to make sure all of that had been registered as successful. The Quest window stated it black on white. Well, black on blue. ‘Thank Gaia for Friendly Fire Protection.’

Another goal done.