“Don’t calm down too much yet,” Tanisha cautioned. “We don’t have much longer before—”
The thump of enormous footfalls began to close in, and the roar of the carcajou filled the air.
It was upon them again.
Chapter 38
The carcajou’s claws smashed against the side of her storage shed, shattering another panel of pillar. Bits of gravel sprayed her like buckshot, and yet more rained down from the shattered roof tiles that no longer had supports. Its toothy maw appeared as it lowered itself towards the hole it made.
Tanisha rushed towards the beast. She knew she’d need to take the fight carefully. Her HP bar could handle a few hits, but the inordinate amount of pain caused by taking a blow was too high of a cost. It would shatter her concentration. Plus, she had Shinji to think about. He’d never participated in combat before, and so she wasn’t sure if he would be immune to attacks, or if he would be crushed with a single hit.
She charged the beast from the side, taking another single swing at it. There was a moment where she thought she could land a second attack, but she needed to make sure it was safe. Bosses tended to have more unusual attack patterns, and she didn’t have any previous experience with this one.
The smaller ring of light cast by her torch wasn’t enough to properly see the creature’s health bar. She wasn’t even sure if her attacks were doing anything to it. It might not even matter. Tanisha circled around the beast once again, until it’s counter-strike landed in the dirt. Once it was clear, she and Shinji took off towards the campfire. Her chair skittered into position, both leading the creature away from her supplies and allowing her to see its health bar.
She did a double-take at the bar. It was nearly full. She’d struck the carcajou at least five or six times by now, but she couldn’t even see if there was a sliver of missing health. That was at least sixty damage! How much health did it have, that so many hits from her was nearly nothing? Sure, it was only a tenth of the HP a blackened bear had, but she hadn’t realized exactly just how much longer this fight would take.
The carcajou’s footfalls were terrifyingly loud as she got in close to the creature. Tanisha got another strike against it, and circled its feet once again, waiting for the next attack. When the creature’s enormous claws dug into the ground, kicking up a plume of dirt, Tanisha struck. Two red thirteens floated away from the carcajou’s leg as the creature bellowed in rage. She circle its feet again, but instead of stopping, she listened to the little video game gremlin in her head. Following the first attack, a second blow landed right behind her chair. And a third. Of course. The carcajou had gone into its charge attack after the roar. If she would have stood still, the alternating left and right claws of the beast would have hammered her into the ground.
Feeling confident, Tanisha fell into a reliable pattern. Now that she knew that the roar was the tell for the charge attack, she kept on the offensive. She would strike twice when she could, and keep circling around its feet. The circle wasn’t tight enough to cause actual nausea, but the curves still made her feel a little dizzy.
She lost track of time, enjoying the rhythm of her attacks and jumping to attention with every roar so that she could dart around it against what seemed to be a random number of charge swings.
After what felt like an hour—longer than it took to fell a blackened bear, but not long enough for two—her hammer skill leveled up to the point where she was dealing fourteen damage with a swing. Her stamina bar was starting to droop, and Tanisha wondered how close the carcajou was to being finished. It had to be halfway there. If she was unlucky, maybe a quarter. But that would still be progress.
Her stamina wasn’t the only thing draining way too quickly. Her stability was also looking dangerously low, what with the constant terror the creature’s scream induced. She needed to see how she was doing. Even if the sight wouldn’t refill her flagging status bars, it would revitalize her morale.
Tanisha waited for a good opening to disengage from the creature, and directed her chair away from it. Shinji whimpered against her side.
“No. That can’t be right.” She looked up at the monster’s HP bar, floating above its head. There was just a tiny sliver of health missing. Barely more than the width of her finger in a bar that stretched for what looked like ten or eleven feet. How much health did this thing have? Strike by strike, she’d whittled out hundreds of hit points. How was it still so healthy? Was she actually going to be here forever?
She got her answer as the creature stomped towards her. With her eyes locked onto the morale-crushing health bar, she watched as the tiny finger of progress began to vanish, and the red bar filled the sliver of dark space between it and its borders.
“It heals,” she whispered, and then louder, as if cursing: “it heals!”
Tanisha ducked away again as the beast attacked her.
“That’s the trick.” She turned her chair around and fled from the creature. “It’s not the random charge. That’s too easy. It’s the regen.”
She racked her brain for how to deal with regen. It was possible that she could just power through it, but without the numbers it was impossible to say. Just as she had no way of knowing if that sliver of health had been the damage of the entire time she’d been engaged with it, or just those last few blows.
There wasn’t a whole lot of confidence, though. Bosses in dARkness: Online usually had a strategy to them. The Uber Sleipdeer had the unavoidable howl damage. There were some lower-level bosses that had challenging attack patterns, specifically to teach newer players about smart defensive play. Many of the Zeni bosses had a debuff that applied a terror status, demanding the perfect avoidance taught by those lower-level bosses.
Tanisha knew the answer to these gimmicks was never to bludgeon through them blindly. They were intended to teach you something, and reward those lessons later on. There had to be something she could do. But the things that she knew countered regen in other games just wouldn’t work here. There was no high burst damage to push through the regeneration, or debuffs that prevented healing. Those weren’t options for her.
The only way she could think of was to out damage the regen by a safe enough margin that she wouldn’t lose all of her progress when the random charge attack prevented her from keeping the pressure on. If one unfavorable attack sequence could undo all her work, it wasn’t enough damage.
“The hammer isn’t right,” she said, looking down at the high-quality weapon. There was already a crack down the side of the stone head, and the rope was fraying. It was nearing the end of its useful life, even if the tool could put out enough damage to break through the regen. “I need a real weapon. And that means a metalworking station.” She looked down to Shinji, who clung to her side as they fled the rampaging carcajou, waiting for it to leash back to her camp again. “I’m going to need your help, buddy.”
The mustelan chittered quietly, and she hoped it was in confirmation, and not fear.
“I’ll need some cut stone. I know that much.” She opened her inventory one handed, the other guiding her mech. Even with the slow down, she’d be fine. The construction menu had the blueprint she needed. “Eight of them,” she confirmed with a grimace. She didn’t have that many in her inventory. But they were out in the open grasslands, and there were still plenty of rocks around.
Tanisha fished two rocks out of her inventory and held them out to Shinji. Despite his obvious fear, he took them and started banging them together, chittering in a worried tone.
As soon as she heard the carcajou give up the chase, Tanisha lowered her chair and slid from the seat to start scowering the ground for rocks. She didn’t need too many—maybe half a dozen total—and it wouldn’t take her long. The only issue was dragging herself along the ground with a torch in one hand. It just wasn’t very easy. But it would have taken longer to raise and lower the chair each time, so she just continued.
She pulled herself back into the chair with Shinji just as the reverberating shatt
er of another wall of her storage shed drifted across the grasslands to her. Her mustelan companion held out a completed cut stone to her, and she gave him two more rocks.
The issue was, she needed more than cut stone to pull this off. In her inventory she had a ton of sticks and more than enough logs. But the other supplies were in storage. She’d need two living stone from the rock lizards, two fur from blackened bears, and whatever parts she’d need for a weapon. The only thing she knew she could make was a spear, as it just required wax, an antler, and a stick. But all of those resources were in the building the carcajou was currently trashing.
Tanisha raced back to camp, pushing her chair to its absolute limits.
She found the carcajou smashing the last bit of wall for the supply gazebo. When it was finished, it turned to the storage chests and raked its claws through the first one. Torches scattered everywhere. Tanisha felt momentary panic, but the creature didn’t turn to the next chest, and instead started to stomp on the torches themselves.
This was good, and bad. On the one hand, it meant that she had some time to collect what she needed while its attentions were on the scattered goods. But on the other, it meant she only had one shot at this. If she couldn’t deal with this beast, it wouldn’t just destroy her structures.
It would destroy everything.
Tanisha angled her chair around the creature, staying far away from its stomping feet. She threw open one of the chests and snatched up the supplies she needed. The blackened bear fur was near the top, and she threw two pieces of it into her inventory. She tried to ignore the twenty-foot-tall monster stomping just an arm length away.
The living stone was at the bottom of this chest, and she threw things out of the way, letting them scatter across the ground. Handfuls of raquail feathers and honeycombs were vaulted away before she could find and stow the living stone in her inventory. Some of her wax was here, too, in the very bottom of the chest. Her hand closed around two blocks at the same time, but she didn’t have time to filter. She just tossed both of them into an empty inventory slot.
Lastly, she grabbed the lone purple sanity-restoring mushroom she’d grabbed the first time she’d gone to gather rocks. Her sanity was low, and still dropping. She shoved it in her mouth, instead of her inventory, and tried to ignore the disgusting texture as she kept moving. This was almost everything. The last thing was an antler, and that was in a different chest.
She turned towards it, just to watch the carcajou’s claw descend upon it.
Tanisha screamed as the chest shattered and the contents were scattered.
Antlers and sleipdeer hides and other odds and sods were strewn across her camp. Instead of waiting for the attack, Tanisha darted in and grabbed the first antler she saw before directing her chair to get clear of the carcajou’s rampage. Everything else would just be sacrificed to its mercy. To stall it. She just didn’t have time to recover anything else.
While it was distracted, Tanisha got to work. The blueprint for the workbench started much like the others. But it quickly became more complicated, made worse by the necessity for her to hold the torch. She tried handing it to Shinji, but immediately they were doused in blackness, and so Tanisha had to soldier on.
Finally, fed up with the juggling act, Tanisha opened her crafting menu again and this time selected the blueprint for a campfire. She quickly unloaded the logs and grass needed from her inventory and slid them into place. As soon as she could see by the flames, she tossed the torch in her hand aside and focused.
It was frustrating. Her hands were shaking. She wasn’t sure if it was pressure or her low stamina bar. But she had to get this done. Had to.
She was finishing the last tool when she heard the carcajou smash her final chest. It was likely smashing all of her food now, meaning she only had a handful of jerky in her inventory to survive on. Until she could hunt. Again.
The last step of the crafting bench was to wrap a chunk of living stone in the blackened bear hide and rest it on the log. She smashed it with the living stone hammer. It shattered, and then crumbled. When Tanisha put the hammer back as instructed, there was a flash of light as the stone caught fire from the hide. After just a bare moment it burned down, and the living stone became hot coals that turned this into a forge.
As neat as it was, Tanisha didn’t have any time to waste. She fetched the materials for the spear. “Hurry, hurry, hurry,” she murmured to herself. The blueprint for the spear directed her to put the antler in the forge, just like she had with the crabstrosity shell. She plunged it into the hot stone before looking over her shoulder while she waited for it to heat up.
And immediately she regretted it.
The carcajou was coming towards her. Or, more accurately, towards her other workbenches. Its claw came down hard, crashing into her provisioning workbench. She flinched at the loss of it, especially since all of the cloth she had was crushed. But maybe it would buy her the time she needed.
Tanisha pulled the antler out of the forge as soon as the next spectral instruction appeared. It directed her to hammer the antler, and she did, as fast as she could. The heat drained from the antler far too fast—most likely attributed to the fact that it was bone and not metal—and she had to plunge it back in.
There was a crash behind her, and Tanisha looked to see her woodworking workbench reduced to splinters.
Her panic grew as the carcajou turned away from the woodworking workbench. It didn’t turn back towards her other structures when the remains were stomped into the dirt.
Instead, it turned towards her, heading straight for her new metalworking workbench.
Chapter 39
She could see the writing on the wall. The grand finale.
All of her hard work would mean nothing. Every attempt would end in failure. Her panic would be for naught.
Instead of giving up, Tanisha scooped to grab her discarded torch and then charged to meet the creature head on. Her hammer was still waiting for her in her lap, next to a violently shuddering mustelan. Tanisha took aim one more time and circled around the beast, baiting its enormous claw attack to strike the ground away from her workbench. And then she turned and ran.
“All I have to do is lead it away,” she said to the small creature against her side. Tanisha looked over her shoulder to confirm the creature was following her, instead of wailing on her workbench. “I can circle around, beat it back to camp, and keep working on the spear. I can do this.”
When the stomping behind her paused, Tanisha did exactly that—circling around and pushing her chair as hard as it would go back towards camp. Her fuel was expendable. The workshop? Not so much. She had enough fuel in her mech to keep this up for a while—maybe not the whole night but a decent chunk of it—and there was still a pot of fuel in her inventory.
The blueprint was still up when she got back to the workbench. Tanisha felt relieved. A spectral hammer was still pounding away at the heated antler. She grabbed the antler out of the forge and went to work, hammering the pliable bone until it went cold enough that it needed to go back into the forge.
It hadn’t been enough time for the carcajou to catch up, but Tanisha knew it would be back before the antler heated back up again. So she put the hunk of bone back in the coals, put down the living stone hammer, and picked up her torch and nearly-broken high-quality hammer once more. After a momentary sigh of exhaustion, she rushed back out into the darkness to meet the carcajou and draw it away again.
The boss monster loomed out of the darkness almost before she left the ring of light of her campfire. She struck it quickly, drawing a roar from the beast. Tanisha knew that meant repeated slams were coming, and she gritted her teeth to think of how much time this could cost her. She turned to sprint away from the creature’s feet, wanting to see how much distance she could get on the creature, but wasn’t quite fast enough. The first attack hit her, and she screamed in pain as a chunk of her health bar vanished. Her chair didn’t stumble though, so the second swing missed.
Finished with it’s multi-hit attack, the carcajou returned to chasing her. Tanisha tried to get her heart rate down as they moved across the grasslands. She was going to be playing this game of leading it away and circling back a lot. The activity had to become a routine, or the stress of doing it would cause her to mess up.
When she got back to the workbench again, she grabbed the antler out of the forge and followed the spectral instructions for hammering it again. The prongs were starting to melt into the central shaft, and the sides were flaring out into a leaf-shaped blade. Even the tip grew sharper with every strike of her hammer. It almost seemed usable now, even though it was a little rough, but the spectral version returned to the forge. Tanisha snarled in frustration and drove the point back into the living stone coals.
“I don’t need it to be perfect!” she snapped at the workbench, as if addressing the blueprint might let her bypass a step. “I just need it to be functional!”
The workbench didn’t respond, but Shinji whimpered and tugged at her elbow. Somewhere behind her, the carcajou was stomping towards her. And the blueprint wasn’t changing. Tanisha snarled again and whirled her chair around, once again taking up her torch and weapon before charging back at the beast.
She intercepted the carcajou with a swing of her hammer.
And it shattered in her hands.
The little red fourteen danced away from the creature’s leg at the same time as the remains of her high-quality hammer scattered from the impact.
Tanisha froze, panic gripping her heart.
She barely snapped out of it in time to avoid the counterattack, but her mind was racing faster than her chair’s feet as she darted off into the darkness.
Darkness Named Page 27
