Party List

Evie Lucian (Cassandra Bailey)

[Soul] : [Radiance]

11,000 / 11,000

11,000 / 11,000

Aleister Demian (Jasmine Burch)

[War] : [Ebon]

11,000 / 11,000

11,000 / 11,000

Fiona Woods (Evan Woods)

[Plate] : [Aegis]

11,000 / 11,000

11,000 / 11,000

Mellody Softsong (Ashton Burch)

[Muse] : [Revel]

11,000 / 11,000

11,000 / 11,000

Caoimhe Phadraig (Kieran Moor)

[Slayer] : [Tyrant]

11,000 / 11,000

11,000 / 11,000

Firo Strix (Blake Walker)

[Mage] : [Invoker]

11,000 / 11,000

11,000 / 11,000

Nyx Alaion (Zoe Fox)

[Shroud] : [Knife]

11,000 / 11,000

11,000 / 11,000

Hibiscus Jade (Marissa Harper)

[Arrow] : [Seeker]

11,000 / 11,000

11,000 / 11,000

Cassandra

As the fight against [Uris] began, Cassandra immediately saw how the fight would work in the first ten seconds or so. She figured the rest of the party probably did too - it felt obvious to her at a glance as soon as she saw the boss reach back and pull a random weapon from the assorted armory he had floating there.

Her party, meanwhile, had taken up their standard spots while waiting for something to happen, or for some kind of tell as to what they needed to do.

"It's a spear." Mellody said

"No way." Fiona said, then chuckled at the not-joke. "But what's it do?"

"No idea. Get ready for -"

[Uris] shoved his spear forward toward Fiona, the active tank, violently. Fiona was lucky and managed to block it just in time, but still took a solid chunk of damage. What really stood out, however, was the way the spear basically exploded at the end of the attack.

There was no AoE marker for danger shown at any point, but the animation was unmistakable. Cass was sure that if Fiona hadn't turned the boss away from the party, at least a couple of their members would be toast.

At the same time, the spear was just gone. [Uris] no longer held any weapon, and the spear didn't reform at his back with the other weapons that floated there.

"Okay, that seems straight forward enough." Cass said.

"It's gonna be another memory mechanic. Goddamn it." Aleister muttered.

"Right. The spear is a forward thrust AoE. Everyone, try to remember." Mellody said. His voice made it sound like he was literally jotting down a note, but Cass was sure that wasn't the case. Or at least she hoped not, as she was quickly trying to heal Fiona up for whatever was coming out next.

[Uris] simply grabbed the next weapon from his back. There were plenty there, but if he kept doing a single attack with each, he would run out of available weapons pretty quickly.

That particular thought was put to rest pretty quickly when the first attack with the axe was a standard one that thumped against Fiona's shield.

"Okay. So I assume we're working in a pattern here. He grabs a weapon, attacks with it, does some kind of special attack to spend it, then goes next." Firo said.

"That's my guess, too." Cass said, and most of the party agreed.

"No way it's that simple. Even if he has like 20 weapons there, doing basic attacks gives us plenty of time for recall." Bisky said.

"Agreed. There's gotta be something else."

[Uris], having made four basic attacks against Fiona, shifted into a stance, holding the axe with both hands, clearly winding up for a big swing. Something tickled the back of Cass's mind, but she wasn't sure if it was something she had seen before or if it was just game sense.

"Everyone in." She said, and immediately dashed Evie in toward the boss. Most of the party followed, or at least tried to. Bisky and Firo had been standing too far away from the boss, comfortably at a distance, to be able to get in far enough. Cass's intuition had been right on the money, as [Uris] swung the weapon in a wide arc and cleaved a huge donut AoE around him.

Awkwardly, Firo and Bisky could have also backed up to safety, which would have been much less distance to move.

"Sorry." Cass said, wincing as she healed them back up. "My bad."

Stolen novel; please report.

"All good, we're alive." Firo said, and Cass sighed in relief; he didn't sound upset at all.

"Good call, though. The big battle axe is a donut." Bisky agreed. "Now we know for next time."

"Right." Cass said. "So, what's next?"

"Looks like….bow?" Aleister said, sounding mildly surprised. "Really? A bow?"

"Seems that way." Fiona said.

"Oh, shit."

[Uris] began attacking with the bow, but he actively disregarded Fiona, who was still at the top of the aggro list, to attack Aleister instead, who was second, as well as further away.

"No worries, the damage isn't too high." Mellody said, as they made sure to keep Alesiter healthy. The tank was caught off guard and didn't have any active mitigation up for the first two strikes, only getting a mit skill up after everyone realized what was happening.

"Expect a line or circle AoE?" Cass guessed.

"Makes sense." Fiona agreed.

"We might be jumping the gun assuming it'll be an AoE at all." Caoimhe said.

"I'm with Caoimhe." Zoe said. "Just be on guard."

After six attacks targeting Aleister, [Uris] dropped to a knee and drew the bow back.

"Aleister! Mit, now!" Bisky shouted.

Thankfully, Aleister reacted fast. Cass watched as three different mitigation skills popped up on Aleister's status right as [Uris] let his arrow fly. The attack streaked through the air like a bullet with a tracer, leaving a silver beam in its wake. Even with all the mitigation, Aleister dropped into double digit HP.

"Holy shit. Thanks, Bisky."

"Yeah, I recognized the Snipe stance. Phew." Bisky said, and Cass could picture a girl wiping her forehead comically.

"Okay, what's next?" Firo said, sounding excited to be making progress.

Cass had to stop herself from laughing when the battlefield seemed to change immediately after he said something. [Uris] pulled out a longsword from his armory as expected, but several of the flying Fae around the tower seemed to suddenly recover enough energy to fly forward and get involved. There were at least eight of them landing daintily on the platform.

"Now, hang on a sec, guys. Before you get mad at me for this, I didn't say anything that could've been considered a jinx!" Firo jumped in quickly, before anyone could say anything else, sounding like he was holding back a laugh of his own.

"You're right." Caoimhe said.

"Indeed." Fiona back him up.

"It seems like you, yourself, talking is the jinx, Firo." Caoimhe continued.

"Seconded." Fiona said, once again following up.

"So…should we just kick him now, or…?" Zoe joked.

"Hang on a sec, we can talk this out!"

"Can we? Wasn't it you talking that got us into this mess?" Bisky snapped good-naturedly.

"I'm innocent, though?" Firo cried as the nine enemies descended on the party.

"Are you?" Cass accused, then shouted, as if she were in an interrogation room, "Are you?!"

"Yes!" Firo shouted on the edge of laughter. Cass could specifically hear Zoe struggling very hard in the background not to laugh.

"I'm watching you…" Cass said threateningly. As she trailed off, the party got to work, spreading out to try to deal with their sudden predicament, but no one was shouting orders, so Cass added in the silence, "You can't see it, but I'm, like, doing that thing where I point at my eyes with one hand, then point at you, then back and again a few times."

Her tone had suddenly swapped from the interrogation room to a valley girl voice, and that had been the party's undoing. The sudden swap had made the entire group lose the fight against the building laughter, and any semblance of the fight was gone.

Cass honestly hadn't thought what she had done was that funny, but Fiona had completely stopped moving, taking [Uris'] attacks to the face without even a [Guard]. Bisky was suddenly firing straight up rather than at a target, and Alesiter was trying to pick up the adds, but was clearly hitting the wrong buttons and failing to generate any threat.

With Aleister unable to control the adds, they immediately targeted Cass, the healer who was currently doing the lion's share of the work, thanks to Mellody's unusually slow actions. The adds may not have done a lot of damage to a tank, but eight of the enemies was enough to surround her and put Evie on the ground in seconds.

Things quickly spiraled from there, the enemies wiping the floor with their party in a matter of moments. But it hardly mattered, as most of the group was still laughing uncontrollably, especially Fiona and Bisky.

After the loading screen finished putting them back before the fight began, Cass sighed. "Aw, man. There's no checkpoint."

No one was coherent enough to pay attention to that, apparently, though.

"Sorry." Fiona wheezed. "Sorry. I need a minute." His voice was broken up by the clear bouts of labored breathing for laughing too hard.

"What? Guys, that wasn't that funny, was it?" Cass asked, almost growing concerned.

"It wasn't." Mellody confirmed, but didn't sound much better off than Fiona did. "It was the delivery." He struggled to say, "And then the way we all died. Plus the way Fiona is still dying…"

Cass figured it was because she was the one that made the joke that she wasn't laughing, but it seemed like the laugher in the group was self-sustaining.

"Well, at least we're all in, like, a great mood, right?" Cass said, once again affecting the bad accent and speech pattern. It definitely got Fiona started all over again, so maybe it was just Fiona that found the accent funny.

"Alright…alright…" Bisky said, trying to regain her composure. "Let's take five to settle down. Everyone get up and grab a drink or something."

"And take your headset off so you don't hear everyone else laughing. That's making it worse." Firo said.

"Aight." Fiona choked out, then it sounded like people got up.

The following two hours went by in a blur. It was taking them a little bit of time to make genuine progress, but they were pushing ahead.

So far, they had put together that this phase was a reliable patterned one - generally speaking, anyway. [Uris] pulled completely random weapons every time, but their mechanics remained the same. The spear was a forward thrust AoE, the axe was a donut, the bow was a tank buster, and so on.

They had seen around 17 different weapons now, and it still surprised Cass how different each was, even during basic attacks. While quite a few of the patterns involved standard attacks focused on Fiona as the main tank, that was less than half. The bow stood out for targeting the second highest [Threat], but there were others, like a staff that launched tracking projectiles on random targets that had to be outrun, or a chakram that was thrown against a random player and bounced around between the party until they spread out far enough to stop the bouncing.

And then, each of those was followed with a standard mechanic. AoEs, stacks, spreads and the like. Most of them were simple enough on their own.

However, what complicated things were the waves of adds. They seemed to come after every third weapon, and they didn't seem to care about how well the party was handling the previous group. Which meant party DPS was paramount here.

As a group, they needed to burn down the adds as fast as possible so they could focus on the boss again. Or, potentially, just manage the adds as best they could while leaving a DPS or two on the main boss to whittle him down while the rest of the party outlasted the adds.

Neither option was easy, and they kept going back and forth, unable to tell which was the best way to handle it. They were making progress mostly through raw memorization and simply performing better each time, but either way they were getting overwhelmed between the third or fourth wave of adds.

"We need to pick a plan and stick to it, guys." Mellody said eventually. "We can't keep bouncing back and forth, and we're making progress in both ways. But we're not learning how to time things correctly."

"I'll second that." Cass agreed. "Mello and I have to keep redoing our healing rotation depending on the plan, so every time we switch we get set back a bit."

"Should we vote on it?" Firo offered.

"Something tells me we're going to have too many people who don't care either way." Caoimhe said. "I vote we have Bisky decide."

"Works for me." Fiona said.

"Any opposed?"

"I am." Bisky said hurriedly, but was clearly ignored.

"Sorry Bisky. You're the leader. You get to decide." Caoimhe said.

Bisky sighed loudly. "Fine. Let's start with focusing down the adds. Let's try to get to the point where we can see what happens when Uris runs out of weapons. If all else fails, we'll burn adds, then swap to focusing on the boss midway through."

There was a chorus of agreements with the plan, though no one sounded overly enthusiastic with it. Which was fair, Cass figured, given that no one felt like one way was better. But still, Cass narrowed her eyes at Bisky on the screen.

"Bisky, that just sounds to me like you didn't actually make a decision at all. You just chose both. At the same time."

"Shut up."

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