NOVEL NEXT 79 - That Part in the RPG where the Final Boss of One Level is a Common Encounter In Another
Archmund's blood pounded through his eardrums.
Yes, this monster looked just like the Ghost of All Granavale. The final boss of the Upper Tier, recurring in the middle.
Of course a creature like it would recur. The Seven-Fingered Starbeasts, as made-up-on-the-spot as the name sounded, had multiplied and become common. The horses, the undead nobles, the skeletons. All commonplace Monsters. Perhaps it had been naive to assume a uniqueness constraint on the boss Monsters as well.
And yet his breath still caught in his throat.
A slim and distended mockery of man, that would have stood ten feet tall straight, if it uncoiled its spine from its wavelike hunch.
Skin as pale as ivory.
Hair black, and slicked back with elemental darkness that rippled like oil.
An opera mask that covered its face, with crimson-like-blood marring its cheeks, and eyes that beaded with avarice.
And spindly hands with fingers like talons.
It opened its hands, and a Gem materialized over each.
"Rory!" Archmund shouted. He drew his Gemstone Rapier. His magic surged through it, instinct twitching in his limbs.
They ran forward, leaving their friends behind.
The Ghost of All Granavale built a fireball, white-hot, from pea to baseball to miniature sun.
And they raised their weapons before them as it flew, Archmund with his Gemstone Rapier, Rory with his Gemstone Quarterstaff.
Rory shouted "Shielding Spin!"
His quarterstaff spun like a helicopter's rotor. It would deflect anything that came. And yet the impact, the heat, the light, the magic fire that burned with the grudges of the dead would impact him nonetheless, shaking his magical reserves, depleting him, weakening him for later.
So Archmund ran forward further still, past the buffeting winds of Rory's spinning staff.
Energy Deflection. That was the variation of his Deflection Skill. He'd tested it with Raehel, before the tournament, but none of his party members had the power necessary to help him practice. Beatrice and Rory couldn't shoot projectiles, Gelias used physical bows and arrows, and Mary used wind, not fire.
His control over this Skill was rough and unrefined. The first time he'd used it, he'd destroyed the manor's flower garden, showering it with embers. While his party could handle it, it was too early to splatter them with a rain of fire.
"Archmund—" Rory said, reproach in his voice. But that didn't matter.
It was great that Rory was there. Because no matter how much of a mess Archmund made, no matter how many pieces he sliced the fireball into, no matter if he scattered embers to the four corners of the earth. Rory's Shielding Spin would keep the others comfortable and safe.
"Deflection," Archmund whispered, his hand tingling with magic flowing into the Gemstone Rapier.
He didn't need to say the skill name, but he felt cool when he did so.
The fireball approached, hot and white, roaring like a distant storm.
His Gemstone Rapier flew before him, cutting the very air. The fireball split upon his blade with one cut, and even as it flew, he slashed once more, splitting the severed halves in twain again.
Four quarters, resuming spherical form as they flew — spheres were the natural distribution of material with few constraints. Yet dispersing faster, the magic wisping away into the surrounding air.
Cut a sphere into four smaller pieces, and it had eight times the surface area. Eight times as much surface for magic to radiate away from, shrinking as it flew, shattering and splashing against Rory's Shielding Spin, dispersing into embers then sparks then nothing at all.
"I could've taken it," Rory called.
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"For how long?" Archmund shot back. His blade danced before him, splitting fireballs as they came.
"Long enough for them," Rory said, jerking his head back.
Gelias jumped into the air, leaping onto the top of a bookshelf.
"Let A Thousand Arrows Fly!" he cried, peppering the Ghost of Granavale with his bow. They sank into its flesh. It didn't bother pulling them out. And yet it screeched madly.
All Monsters were regenerative, capable of taking great amounts of damage, yet weak to inconveniences and pain. You wanted to kill Monsters quickly and painlessly in order to get the best loot drops from them, of course, but if you couldn't do that, a great way to survive was by inflicting massive amounts of pain and suffering, such as by shooting hundreds of arrows at them very quickly.
They would adapt to try and take out your threat, but they depleted their limited stores of energy to do so, which made them easier to kill. Even if the Gems they dropped at the end were Shaped, stripped by survival instinct of raw magical potential that could become anything, that was better than dying.
By inflicting pain, you could goad Monsters into taking specific shapes, and so this Ghost of Granavale grew armor like anklosaurus plates, running around its distended body like samurai armor.
And Gelias's thousand arrows tinked off of it harmlessly once more.
And then a gash of black blood-like fluid spewed from its neck.
"Soft, fleshy parts," Beatrice whispered, as she stepped silently out of shadow to stand next to him. "That's what you pulled on Rory at the festival."
"It's a little different," Archmund grunted between slicing fireballs in half, "when it's a spar compared to when you're fighting a Monster."
But he couldn't quite say how.
Because sadistically inflicting pain was an effective way of keeping Monsters in check. Which had sort of been what he'd done to Rory.
Her powers scared him. She could manipulate "shadow" almost in the same way he manipulated heat and light. With her Shadow Cloak skill, she could walk through the shadows, step out of them just briefly enough to slash the Monster in its vulnerable points, and then vanish back to safety. She was just using a dagger made of mundane steel, since her parents forbade her from Gemstone Gear, but from such close range that was more than enough for a Monster.
Or a human, for that matter. What was stopping her from just killing anyone anywhere? It terrified him, frankly.
He could remember occasional homicidal intrusive thoughts stretching back even into his first childhood. He hoped she wasn't like him in that regard.
And yet as they watched the Monster's throat healed, knitting itself back together, and the armor plates crawled their way up its neck.
But it wasn't nearly as scary or vicious as the first Ghost of All Granavale.
Its fireballs were slower. It didn't spawn minions. It raised no barriers.
It had no signs of humanity or intelligence, perhaps the lingering thoughts and recollections of his dead mother.
And that meant he would be enough.
He pulled his Ruby Tetrahedron from within his cloak, and it danced in the air like a floating star.
"Infrared Lance."
A needle-thin ray of invisible infrared light, pure heat energy, seared through the Ghost of Granavale's eyes, blinding it, burning a hole through its head.
Such a strike wasn't enough to kill such a Monster, of course: though the Ghost of Granavale had a hole in its head, elemental darkness knit together in the gap, like creeping black mycelium.
The Ghost of All Granavale, which had taken the form of his mother, had endured a similar attack easily, only losing its eyes. This beast with similar form got a hole bored through its head.
It was undeniably weaker.
Yet still familiar.
As it healed, the gauzy black mycelium sprouted out of the hole in its head like pus from a wound. Eyes, disturbingly human, beaded at the end of each of the stalks — brown irises on white spheres.
A hundred human eyes fixed on Archmund.
He fired his Infrared Lance, over and over, taking only seconds for each. Each time it burned an eyestalk. Each time, more regrew from the charred husk, like the heads of a hydra, until its head was wreathed with eyes like hair and kudzu. Cauterization wasn't working.
It didn't have a defensive barrier to raise, no wall of reverberation that could stop energy attacks. They could whittle it down together — Gelias's arrows and Beatrice's stabs and his Infrared Lances.
It was a plan that was good on paper.
"Prepare to fire!" he shouted. "All together."
And the beast's thousand eyes narrowed.
It clutched the twin Gems hovering over its palms…
And ate them.
Its gullet undulated as the two lumps trickled down its throat.
It was like how the monstrous horses had turned upon each themselves, cannibalizing each other to form the Hundred-Eyed Centaur. They had chewed at the Gemgear too, eating the crystallized power in those lattices.
No plan survives contact with the enemy. This Ghost of Granavale had followed the script of his earlier fight at first, flinging fireballs and suffering under his energetic attacks — but now the battle was in unknown territory.
They weren't in Kansas anymore.
The wise option would be caution. He gestured to his compatriots.
Gelias stepped to his right, ready to aid with his firepower.
Beatrice stood by his left, awaiting his signal.
Mary stood a few steps behind, scanning the sides carefully.
And Rory took a few steps in front, ready to defend.
They were ready for anything the Monster could throw at them—
The creature raised its hands in front of itself. Those hands gleamed, glittered even, as if tiny particles of diamond were embedded in the skin. Like sparkly vampires from a young adult novel, though the dim death-light of the Dungeon could hardly match the harsh brilliance of the unconquerable sun.
And then it plunged its claws into the air before it, and it tore.
And Archmund couldn't tell what he was seeing.
A blackness. An emptiness. Like fabric tented off of a flat table. Rippling towards them, rupturing the space between them, impossible to dodge, impossible to block—
What was this? It was something deeper, more fundamental. It wasn't fair, to go from fire and barriers and ghosts and swords to this rippling, this distortion that he could not identify, neither dodge nor block nor turn away—
And then Archmund stood alone.