Chapter 31: Chapter 31: Sunset

[Aspect of the Sun] Lv. 35

There was no moment of reprieve as the actual boss emerged, a wave of flame washing over the room towards them all, signaling the beginning of the final fight of the dungeon.

Prim and Monica dove for cover behind the towering pillars, Elise bracing both shields in front of her as the tides of fire struck hard, barely able to stay standing against the sheer force of the impact.

It ended as quickly as it started, the three that had managed to reach cover peaking out from safety after a moment, surveying the scale of the damage around them.

What remained of the broken pews was now nothing more than soot strewn over the room, painting it somber shades of black and grey. The checkerboard black and white stone was scorched entirely black, the previously brilliant traces of gold running through it now dead and lifeless, their usefulness completely expended.

“Nnn… I-I’m… I’m okay…!”

Elise stood alone amidst the scorched temple, still standing upright despite the inferno that had washed past her. Her armor, however, had fared significantly worse. A handful of her joints had melted and fused together, both her massive greatshields welded clear down the seam and completely inseparable as the tank was forcibly immobilized.

“Oh, hell… just stay there, I can break you o- gah!!”

The crafter had barely strayed a step away from her cover before another shrill cry echoed, signaling another attack baring down on them, a golden fireball dwarfing even their towering Vanguard streaking down the hallway towards the party.

“St… Stalwart…!”

A faint blue aura covered the tank, finally forced to use one of her starting skills as she tried to shield herself at the last moment against the second heatwave.

Balled hellfire struck her shields directly, flames washing past her as she parted the tide on impact, blue aura shining brightly as she was stuck in place through it.

Stalwart boosted her already massive VIT by an extra 50%, but left her totally immobile while in use… a tradeoff that hardly seemed relevant as her armor was slowly melted into a solid mass around her.

A second fireball came soon after, followed by a third and fourth, the summoned phoenix giving no time to mount a counter attack as it let lose a barrage of magicked flame towards them all.

Each hit pushed her back further and further, doing her best to survive as her HP drained slowly but surely, setting a hard time limit on how long she could tank them.

“Guh… Prim, you get her free the instant it’s clear, ok?”

“Eh? I can’t get close to her like this…!

“I… I g-got it… under control… no worries!”

“You absolutely aren’t, just get yourselves safe while I keep their attention!”

“B-But…!”

“No buts! Taunt!~”

With a wink and a wave, their hotheaded “main” tank dove around the far side of their pillar with a very distressed Silk still stuck along with them, sprinting towards the boss as her skill pulsed outwards, pinging the boss as she tried to take the (literal) heat off of the other pair.

The moment the Taunt reached the phoenix, their gaze snapped off to the side, sparing not a second before aiming its stream of flame towards the speeding mage.

“That idiot… guh, fine, let’s get you free if she wants to play target dummy so bad.”

“Right, t-thanks…”

Her hammer clattered to the floor as she pulled an array of tools, shoving a health potion into the significantly taller girl’s mouth as she got to work reopening her armor’s welded-shut joints, the elf doing her best to try and twist and pry them looser while she was operated on.

Sweat boiled off of Monica as she ran, staying at an angle from the phoenix as it continued raining fire down at her, every shot a tight enough miss to feel it char against her chitin, bits of webbing starting to catch fire as she tried to smother them out again.

Her speed gradually stacked higher and higher once again, needing time to get to full power while she tried to watch their target for anything they could do against it.

“Persistent thing, huh? Haaa… well, how about… Blowback!”

She swung her staff behind her with one hand, not daring to stop moving long enough to aim her skill any better than that.

Luckily enough however, the massive projectiles being launched her way weren’t exactly hard targets to hit, the weapon getting good and singed from the moment of contact as she batted the fireball back to its owner.

Every ounce of momentum that had gone into sending it towards her was redirected the exact opposite direction, the wad of hellfire crashing hard against the towering bird, eliciting a pained screech from it and a smug grin from the caster herself…

…which rapidly faded to dismay once she saw the results of her counterattack.

Green damage effects appeared over it as the flame collided with its owner, rather than the usual red, and not a single point of health was emptied.

“…guess I should’ve expected this thing to heal off of fire damage…”

Her primary means of killing bosses was already off the table now, leaving her slightly more concerned with their limited options for actually attacking the monster. She wasn’t given any time alone with her thoughts however, the same steady stream of flame chasing at her heels as she accelerated around the bird.

Far behind her, metallic clanks and snaps were muffled out under constant burning and screeches, the other two hard at work still.

“Okay, just gotta split along this section… cut through this… and snap this whole chunk off… gods, I’m gonna have to refinish the whole suit after this… okay Elise, can you move now?”

“L-Let’s see… yeah, yeah I t-think I can walk again now…! But, um… can’t really move these much still…”

Elise lifted and shook her paired shields, currently half-melted and fused into a single bluish metal slab.

“Not a lot I can do about those without more time than I have, they took the whole thing head-on. Gonna be able to use them still?”

“I’ll… I-I’ll make do!”

Clumsily hefting her unwieldy double-shield as the other girl retrieved her own weapon, the duo rushed to back up their frantically fleeing companion.

“Why’s the damn thing gotta be so high up…? I can’t hit it all the way up there!”

Their target rotated in place as it tracked the fox, noticeably not moving from its midair perch despite the ample room for it to maneuver and pursue them all. In fact, if she didn’t know any better…

Her Master’s Eye whirred and zoomed in, downloading any data worth knowing from the boss’s status page.

Skills:

Active – Phoenix Crash, Leyline Protection, Rising Sun

Passive – Flame Eater, Soulbound

[Soulbound]

- Bound by immovable magical forces to an item, and cannot move or be moved.

…exactly what she’d thought. It was rooted firmly in place by whatever the cultists had done with the massive gold platform laying under it, using it like a battery to keep itself alive.

And if it needed the ritual-charged platform to live, that made destroying it a much faster solution than trying to deal with the beast themselves.

“Elise! Start breaking the platform up!”

“Eh? W-Why not hit them direct-”

“How do you plan on doing that?”

She quickly glanced up, the hulking firebird flying a good thirty or forty feet above.

“…p-platform it is!”

The pair immediately got to work, oversized weapons chipping away at the remains of the gold-lined platform, weapons becoming makeshift mining implements as they struck at the faded gold veins.

Immediately, the beast reacted, the intently focused assault being interrupted by shudders rippling through it in time with each impact of a greatshield and hammer against its summoning circle. Their massive HP pool finally began to drain out slowly, finally having done real damage to their quarry.

Monica watched them both from afar, having to redouble her avoidance efforts as the pained writhing made the fiery fusillade significantly harder to dodge, a singed and panicked Silk loudly deriding the kitsune as they were dragged along with them.

“C-C-Chhhk! Chkchk! Chk chkchk!!!”

“I didn’t ask you to tag along!”

“Chk?! Chk chkchk!”

“Okay, maybe I did forget you were back there, but-”

“Chkchhhk?!”

“I get it, fine, fine!”

She pried the argumentative arachnid off her back, angry chittering turning confused as they were lifted free… only to find themselves going airborne, a Blowback whacking into them and sending them flying away from the moving target the caster had become.

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Elise and Prim kept attacking the inanimate summoning circle, having knocked almost a third of its health away already as it remained oblivious of them.

“Haaa… damn thing’s just… a damage sponge…”

“W-We’re getting there, just a bit- guh!”

The tank glanced up to check their progress and make sure their caster was surviving, and was instead greeted by a face-full of spiderling, Silk being forcibly delivered into their significantly safer care, eyes spinning as they recovered from being launched.

Prim herself put her entire back into the excavation as the other two untangled themselves, Stoneshatter after Stoneshatter cratering the denser-than-anticipated ritual platform, her arms aching still after her own earlier bout with an equally healthy chunk of rock and metal. She wiped her brow with one hand, the other digging into her bag, rooting around inside it for her seemingly infinite supply of explosives. She pulled an extremely tiny one of them out, barely the size of her palm, and tossed a few feet upwards, letting it crash back down into the stony expanse as a test.

It detonated on impact exactly as intended, leaving a small dent of its own in the stone… as well as a dent in the phoenix itself.

Fire was a no-go, but explosions were at least classified as different enough to not undo their painfully slow progress, and with significantly less arduous labor behind it.

“Blegh… did Moni go ahead and g-get you to safety, little guy? S-See, I told Prim she wasn’t so bad. You see, Pr-”

Glancing over to her accomplice, the rest of her sentence was drowned out even more than before, a cascade of bombs arcing out from the crafter’s personal stash, raining destruction on the platform as a slow trickle of damage became massive chunks of HP emptying from the boss, the Berserker unloading every last resource she had on hand into them.

By now, between the explosions rocking the cavernous chamber and the firebird’s drastically worsening aim, Monica was forced to duck for safety behind one of the massive pillars once more, taking the time to frantically try and put out both of her smoking and scorched tails, stealing peeks back at the boss as it writhed.

A missing third of HP quickly became a half, which even more quickly became two thirds, the phoenix clearly not having been designed around the sheer quantity of attack items a party as non-standard as this could horde and lug into a fight with them.

Prim continued her ecstatic bombardment, cackling to herself as the boss died faster and faster… conveniently not noticing the sudden shift in the room as the phoenix dropped to its last third of health.

The moment it did, the scattered handful of bombs still in midair froze in place, idly rotating for a moment, as if they’d forgotten what it was they were meant to be doing. Their crafter remained blissfully unaware as they merely continued feeding more and more bombs into the strange force barrier.

Elise and Silk however, were keenly aware that their projectiles were now being stopped dead in their tracks, a sinking feeling in their gut as they glanced at one another, then back to the preoccupied halfling.

“Ahaha, see, not even a problem!~ We’ll be done here before you can even say-”

They never got to finish their boast as a wad of webbing and a well-muscled right arm slammed into them, lifting them up bodily as she was carried off by her drastically more sane and levelheaded companions.

“Hey…! I’m not done yet, they’re still…!”

“N-Not now, get down!”

“Chkchk chhhk!”

Less than a second after she was pried from her spot by the fleeing tank a massive explosion launched the trio away, several more explosions following it up as the ground was blown away under them.

“That’s w-what I was afraid of…!”

The Vanguard scrambled for safety with both her tiny charges in tow, diving for safety behind a pillar, all three of them finding themselves bombarded by their overeager Berserker’s own explosives cache as it was reflected back at them.

And unlike the one that had provided it with so much spare ammo, the boss was much more conservative with the explosives reuse, dispensing them just fast enough to keep them pinned down and unable to reach their target any further.

“…ehe… sorry about that…”

“A-As long as you’re okay, we can just wait it out, right?”

“Yeah, it won’t last… oh, come on!”

She’d peered back up at the retaliating phoenix, checking how close they were to killing it, and were greeted by deeply unfortunate news. Deprived of any need to attack them anymore themselves, the boss had taken to instead bathing themself in flame, very slowly restoring its HP and undoing their hard work.

“We can’t just let it- hrngh.”

As soon as Prim had gone to charge out of cover, she was swiftly reeled back behind the pillar by an overprotective elf, narrowly dodging another of the returned bombs.

“Oh n-no you don’t!”

“But-”

“No! No one gets to d-die stupidly while I’m here.”

Meanwhile on the opposite side of the boss chamber, Monica sneezed, newly freed from having to dodge any fireballs as the phase change had reset the boss’s aggro left her wholly unnoticed.

The kitsune had gotten a good view of the others whittling down the boss by blowing up the leylines under it, as well as their quick retreat as their method was swiftly stopped just shy of landing a killing blow. And with the three of them pinned down under their own barrage, that only left her to finish off the boss before they were completely reset and they were sent back to square one, with a considerable chunk of their resources burned through already.

Unfortunately, she was hardly qualified to deal the coup de grace herself. She had no attacks, no bombs, no means of direct damage, no way to reflect other damage back towards the firebird, and most importantly, no access of her own to convenient explosives-

…

……

………

A deep, horrid, scowling grimace quickly sank into her expression.

With a grunt, the dismayed mage sped towards the platform herself, preparing to finish off the work the rest of their party had started.

The platform itself was wholly undefended and her approach went unchallenged, all aggro currently focused on the others, no one else in the room paying her any heed whatsoever. She was thankful for that much at least, as the next part of her plan was incredibly dependent on going undetected.

“Let’s… hope this works… Hazard Fumes!”

Once more, her poison cloud deployed around her, spreading to almost cover the entirety of the gold-coated slab under her.

Despite the overwhelming severity of her supercharged debuff abilities, a rock remained a rock. And as an inanimate object, it found itself neither poisoned, silenced, stunned, or blinded, having no need for any of those functions to exist as a battery. And the boss themselves remained hovering far overhead, well out of range of any of the heavy toxins filling the airspace underneath it.

This however, was all totally irrelevant to the plan being executed, as not a single effect of the poisons was what was needed here.

“Hazard Fumes! Hazard Fumes!! Hazard Fumes!!!”

Again and again and again she recast the same spell, each instance stacking on top of the last, the range remaining unchanged as the cloud itself simply grew in density, soon thick enough to completely obscure any view of the Gloom Mage within, a perfect dome of roiling green fumes encasing her and the stone platform under her feet.

Elise and Prim peeked carefully from behind their pillar, careful to not stick their heads out far enough to catch a stray bomb for their troubles.

“Can you tell where Moni is from here…? She might be able to do something to take the heat off us for a bit…”

“O-Oh, right! Lemme see, she should be… no, she moved from behind there…? But w-where would she…”

“Lemme see, c’mon, move over. Yeah, gone from over there, but I don’t see-”

“Wait, i-is that…?”

“…oh, that’s her cloud, yeah. Can you tell what she’s trying in there?”

“She’s just… s-standing there?”

“...chk?”

“Yeah, j-just casting, looks like.”

“Is she trying to poison the summoning circle…? It’s not like she can just…”

There was an uncomfortably long pause, gears rapidly whirring in all three of their heads as they all came to the same realization at once.

“Oh hell, both of you get back now-”

“C-Chk chhhk-”

“S-S-Stalwart-”

Monica glanced upwards, sighing as she made out the figure of the oblivious phoenix flying overhead through her self-made smokescreen, last moment second thoughts racing through her mind.

“…why’s it always have to end like this…?”

Her staff aimed straight down, closing her eyes as she let the fumes embrace her, taking one last breath in the clogged air.

“…F-Flash.”

There was a pitiful sputter of flame from the end of her staff in the first moment. And in the second, it was like a second sun had risen from the platform, white-hot hellfire erupting as the tiny flame was fed as much incredibly volatile gaseous fuel as it could ever want, broiling flames flooding out in every direction as the detonation obliterated anything unfortunate enough to be anywhere near a certain explosion-prone fox.

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