“I thought the Jotuns caught you in here,” I asked, confused.
Dart pointed upward. “Yeah, right after I’d cleaned out the first floor — that was probably why we didn’t run into anything up there. I never made it this deep.”
I steeled myself for another frustrating hours-long run, but found myself looking on in shock as Dart made mincemeat of the monsters, mostly without my help. His illusions were no joke. They provided amazing distractions, allowing him to execute numerous backstab moves that ignored the enemy’s alertness level when calculating damage. The cherries on top were a bag full of crafted smoke bombs that featured varying, but equally nasty, debuff effects such as poison, temporary blindness, and paralysis.
In short, our run through the temple was…fun? Was I even allowed to have fun when Brandon’s life was on the line? But that didn’t mean there weren’t drawbacks.
“What a waste,” Dart said as we finished mopping up another mob. “I’m hardly getting any Skill Points or Attribute Orbs from these kills. The loot blows too. I wonder if that’s because you’re fighting with me even though we’re not partied up.”
“Makes sense,” I said as I yanked my smoldering axe from the back of a Jotun ice zombie. “I can always hang back if you want, maybe get out of the range that triggers the diminished loot?”
Dart shook his head. “Nah, not worth it. We’ll get partied up before we finish the boss, which is where the good stuff will be anyway. Don’t worry about me, man.”
He grabbed the last of the loot from an ice gremlin then snapped his fingers. The Dart illusions disappeared as we continued down the hall. It seemed their effect was lessened if the enemy saw the copies from the start of the fight. Dart usually brought them in after trading a couple of attacks — the poor monsters didn’t know what to make of the duplicates.
We spent another forty-five-ish minutes hacking through enemies, and while it took a bit longer than I’d hoped, we were standing in front of the yeti’s boss door before long. Part of me wished we’d had something more to show for basically clearing the temple a second time, but I told myself to just be grateful I’d found Dart at all. Without his help, I knew I wouldn’t have had a chance at rezzing Leesha and defeating the boss. As we passed through the weremammoth’s chamber, I almost cried in relief when no mini-boss spawned. With my luck, I would have expected to fight that ugly bastard a second time.
I called a halt when we reached the tunnel that led down to the yeti’s abyss and ran through the details with Dart one last time to make sure we were on the same page. I reviewed all of the moves, patterns, strengths, and weaknesses I’d seen from the yeti in our previous fight. Meanwhile, Dart was able to fully recharge his arcana. As great as his abilities were, I was sure they would eat into his arcana pretty quickly if he wasn’t careful.
“Remember,” I said, “when we go in there, our first goal should be to revive Leesha. You distract while I do that. Then we can party up in the middle of the battle and hopefully not be deprived of important loot.”
“Got it. Just so you know, my personal illusions are based on my overall health as well as arcana. As the battle goes on and I take damage, I won’t be able to maintain as many copies of myself.”
“Okay. You ready?”
“Let’s go.”
After that epic conclusion to our conversation, we then proceeded to slip and slide all the way back down the tunnel for another five minutes. Even Dart ate crap a couple of times before we made it to the edge of the yeti’s chamber.
I peered across the room. Mr. Yeti was on the far side of the chamber sitting…cross-legged? Apparently the boss was now an abominable yogi, too. I looked up, expecting to see Leesha’s body hanging frozen from the ceiling. No dice — apparently the yeti hadn’t been able to get her to stick for long. My first order of business would be to find her.
“Well, there it is in all its glory,” I told Dart.
The redheaded player stared. Even with the couple of levels he had on me, I realized it must have been his first taste of a good ole-fashioned MythRune boss. “That’s…big,” he said at last. He shook his head. “But nothing we can’t handle. Let’s see how it does seeing double, eh?”
The yeti sensed us the moment Dart and I crossed the threshold. Rising to its feet, the thing pounded its chest and issued a challenging roar. I was less than pleased to see its health was back to full, but, a moment later, had bigger worries.
All of a sudden, I couldn’t think straight. The yeti’s scream hadn’t deafened me, but now I was filled with uncertainty, my mind focused on the pain I’d experienced in my last encounter with the boss. I didn’t want a repeat of what had happened before.
What the heck’s wrong with me?
Debuff Added — Stone-Cold Intimidation — A yeti of the Ice Spear Mountains is fearsome enough the first time you face him and lose. You’ve got to be a special kind of stupid to go for round two. Minus 20% Attack Rating for 10 minutes.
That explained it. Oh, to hell with this game! I thought. Seriously, it was punishing me for leaving and trying again? And it wasn’t just a stat decrease, either. They were psychologically messing with me! I felt pretty sure this wasn’t in the Terms of Service, but in that moment, I was more afraid of the actual danger than any bad trip MythRune tried to send me on.
“What’s wrong?” Dart said, stopping in his tracks when he noticed I wasn’t next to him.
“The stupid game gave me a negative twenty percent Attack Rating for ten minutes!”
“Then I guess we’ll have to try twenty percent harder,” he said. “Don’t forget the plan. Rez your friend — that’s all you need to worry about right now.”
His last sentence came from not one, but several Darts. All of a sudden, I saw no less than four other versions of him running toward the yeti, confusing both it and me in the process. But I had no time to get caught up in the spectacle. I sprinted as fast as my big ungainly body could manage on the ice — which was also in pristine condition again — toward Leesha’s body.
As soon as the boss stood up, I saw her. Strangely, the yeti had built a sort of shrine around her out of broken icicles, giving me that weird King Kong and his lady love vibe again. Nearing Leesha, I glanced over my shoulder. Dart seemed to have the situation well in hand. Although he wouldn’t be able to deal out enough damage to take the boss down on his own, his illusions were giving the poor yeti hell. I just hoped it didn’t luck out and hit the real Dart with one of the ice chunks it was hurtling willy-nilly.
With no time to waste, I dropped down and slid the last few feet to Leesha’s body. Uncorking the revive potion, I dumped it on her pale corpse, all the while keeping one eye on the yeti. If the boss decided to come after us before she was up and going, we’d be sitting ducks. As the last of the potion splattered over her frost-covered armor, Leesha’s eyes flickered open. Color started returning to her pale, lifeless features, and then she gasped and sat upright.
“It’s okay, I’m here,” I said, trying to calm her. I had a pretty good firsthand idea what waking up after a traumatic experience was like since beginning MythRune.
My heroism was rewarded with a punch in the arm strategically placed just below my pauldron where my damsel in distress knew I’d feel it. So much for chivalry.
“It’s about damn time!” Leesha yelled. “I was about ready to log off and call it quits. We really need to come up with a better plan than me just sitting around and —”
“Not now,” I said, cutting her off, “we still need to take out the yeti.”
Leesha’s eyes widened. “Why didn’t you kill it? What, are you going to make a pet out of it or something?”
I jerked my head toward the yeti and Dart battling. A trio of Dart’s illusions taunted the boss while the real Dart snuck up behind it and executed a backstab in the yeti’s lower back. The boss roared in pain and spun around, but was greeted with four Darts in total as he did. Even I didn’t know which was the real one once he’d jumped away.
“You
let him out.” Leesha’s voice was flat, making it impossible to tell if she was mad or not.
“I didn’t have a choice,” I said. I’d prepared for her to be pissed, but hoped we could at least delay it until after the fight.
Surprisingly, Leesha just nodded. “You had to do what you had to do. I just hope it doesn’t bite us in the ass when this fight is over.”
“Hey!” Dart yelled across the chamber, breathing heavily. “It’s awesome you guys are having a moment over there, but do you think you can give me a hand?”
I looked at Leesha. “You’re going to have to accept the invite too.”
For a minute, I thought she was going to hesitate, but then a notification popped into my peripheral.
Congratulations! You and Leesha have formed a party with Dart. You will now be able to share in quest rewards and loot. Please review your loot settings in the Party Options settings.
Before I could open the Party Options, however, a shout from Leesha drew my attention. I blinked the menu away just in time to see the real Dart go sailing across the chamber. It seemed the yeti didn’t completely suck at the illusion shell game after all. I cringed as Dart hit the ice hard, exhausting about a third of his health. At the same time, three of his copies blinked out of existence, too. The others flickered and reappeared around the fallen Dart while he clambered to his feet. Apparently they had a limited area of effect.
“Cover him!” I shouted to Leesha. She was already running after the yeti.
“Cover me!” Leesha yelled back. I realized she’d switched out her bow for her daggers. That could only mean one thing: she was out of arrows. I would have cursed myself for not picking up more at the Frostfang village, but I needed to get my ass in gear.
Running toward the yeti, Leesha dropped into a power slide just as the yeti’s massive paw swept down to grab her. Her momentum carried her just below the grasping hands of the boss and right between its legs. As she passed, she stabbed one dagger just below the yeti’s ankle, then rolled to safety.
The yeti stumbled and shrieked in pain, but before it could round on Leesha, I was on it.
“Remember me?” I shouted as my axe struck the side of its other leg. A second later, two Darts were at my side, leaping at the boss. Their distraction gave me just enough time to maneuver out of the way of a hairy, wayward yeti swing. I triggered my Flaming Weapon and struck again, this time in the yeti’s hip.
And just like that, I could feel the subtle shift in momentum. We weren’t out of danger yet, but we had this bastard on the ropes.
Dart hurtled a smoke bomb that exploded with perfect timing in the yeti’s face. Just as the dark clouds engulfed the yeti’s head, I saw Leesha flying through the air, striking the boss in the back with one of her signature assassination moves.
My turn. Draining the last of my arcana, I activated one last Flaming Weapon. The yeti pawed at its head, trying to clear the stinking smoke clouds whirling around it — a sitting duck. I swung my axe in a semicircle, a move that would have made Paul Bunyan proud. With my axe-head still aflame, I activated Hook and Hack. I yanked the boss’s leg out from underneath it; then, completing the combo trifecta, I triggered Cyclone. The full force of the three attack modifiers hit the yeti in the gut, driving it to the ground. Flat on its back on the ice, the boss let out a low moan, a small flashing sliver of its HP all that remained. The smoke dissipated, revealing Dart and Leesha across from me near each of the yeti’s shoulders.
“I think we’ll let you do the honors,” Dart said.
I flourished my axe and grinned. “Gladly.”
41
Token Acquired
Dart let out a heavy sigh and sat down on the icy floor. “Well, that was fun.”
He’d been a real champ, not only knocking down a third of the yeti’s health on his own, but also providing the support Leesha and I needed to finish the boss off. I hadn’t even taken any damage. It just went to show how much a third person changed the game. Maybe next time, we’d have to listen to the suggested party number in a dungeon.
“Fun?” I said. “You made it look easy.”
The three of us combined could breeze through dungeon after dungeon, doing some serious power leveling before the tournament began. The boss fight had been a blast. I even briefly entertained the idea of letting Dart in on our secret.
But then I remembered why I was risking the banhammer with God Mode in the first place. For Brandon. It was too big a risk to let another person in, another person who would undoubtedly want a cut of the prize.
“Looking easy is one thing,” Dart said, downing the last of a potion. “If you guys hadn’t been here when that yeti turned me into a paper airplane, I would have been toast. With that many illusions going at once, I’m a glass cannon. Actually, not even that. The illusions don’t deal damage, so I’m just relying on tricks.”
While Dart and I were chatting, Leesha, as loot-oriented as ever, had been pawing through the sad sack of fur that was the dead yeti. “I can’t believe this — not a damn thing! Not even a pelt or a fang or anything. What a joke!”
My heart briefly sank until I realized what that meant. If there wasn’t any loot on the boss, then perhaps…
“Hey!” Dart pointed to the back of the ice chamber, where a dark object sat atop an icy pedestal. That definitely hadn’t been there before. “Is that a chest?”
Heart hammering, I raced toward the object, which indeed proved to be a chest. Leesha, Dart, and I stopped a few paces away, staring. It looked just like the box we’d found in the Blue Hand Raiders’ cave. Three golden letters were stamped on the lock: LMR. This was it.
“Get it, Z,” Leesha said, in a loud, stern voice.
I hardly noticed, though, as I reached forward and grasped the latch. Nothing moved. The chest was locked. I cursed myself for not investing in lockpicking even though it made no sense for a tank to do so.
“Can you unlock it?” I asked Leesha. “You’re sure there wasn’t a key on the yeti?”
She shook her head. “Nope. And nope. When have I ever said I knew lockpicking?”
I frowned at her, irritated. “What kind of rogue character doesn’t learn lockpick? Are you serious?”
“Hey, chill out,” Leesha said, scowling back at me. “There’s got to be a way to open it — they wouldn’t just reward us with a locked chest if no one could open it.”
Behind us, Dart gave a polite cough. “I might be able to help you out there.”
Leesha and I looked at each other and then at our newest companion.
“No, thank —”
“Sure,” I said at the same time Leesha refused him. I glared at her.
“Looks like the two of you have something to discuss,” Dart said with an awkward chuckle.
Leesha took a deep breath, as if frustrated that she even had to explain herself. “Look, Dart. You seem like a nice guy and all, but we don’t really know you.”
“You don’t know him,” I said.
“And you do? You’ve been with him for, what, a few hours?”
“It was longer than you and I were together before we partied up.”
Leesha scrunched her face. “That was different.” She didn’t elaborate, but it was clear what she was hinting at. In our circumstance, she had discovered my God Mode ability and essentially blackmailed me.
I crossed my arms and nodded my head in spite of myself. “Yeah, you’re right,” I said. “But do you have a better idea?”
“Let’s break it open,” she said. “You have an axe and big Urok muscles. Why don’t you just smash your way through it like every other problem you run into?”
I ignored the jibe, but it was Dart who offered a rebuttal. “It could be rigged with a trap?” he suggested.
He was right. I’d made the mistake of breaking open a chest during beta once, and in that instance, my character had been instantly blown to smithereens. I did not want to find out what that might realistically feel like.
But that didn’t
mean I liked the idea of handing the chest over to Dart, either. If I opened it up and set off a trap, my God Mode secret could be revealed. And if Leesha died again and Dart turned on me, there was no way I could take him. One of the downsides of creating parties was that you could leave them at any point. Joining a party was tough. Leaving one was easy. If he really wanted, Dart could screw us instantly. He seemed like a cool dude, but you never knew what someone else was thinking. If there was a token inside, who knew what he might try to get his hands on it?
Leesha and I both locked eyes, the two of us clearly going over the same scenarios in our head. I knew she was right — we couldn’t risk it.
“Everyone step back. I’ll open it,” I said. I looked to both Leesha and Dart to see if either would disagree. Both just shook their heads and backed away in response.
I let out a long breath I hadn’t known I was holding and set the chest on the ground. Squaring up my feet, I poised my axe over the box as if I were splitting a piece of wood in half.
An instant later, a white flash blinded me. A sharp, stinging sensation pierced my chest and shot like an electric current through the rest of my body. My limbs seized up and I fell to the ground, unable to move so much as a finger.
Debuff Added — Stunned! Movement limited by 100% for 30 seconds.
What in the hell? I hadn’t even had the chance to strike the box with my axe — that was some potent ward.
Another bang interrupted my thoughts, and a thick, boiling fog filled my vision.
“Z!” I heard Leesha’s voice, though I couldn’t place where it was coming from.
Dart has left your party.
Oh no…
“Looks like the jig is up.” Dart’s voice somehow ricocheted throughout the fog, making it impossible to pick out his location. “The two of you are so annoyingly careful. You sure made this harder than it had to be. Still, I’m sad our little arrangement has to end. You guys were doing a great job leading me from token to token.” There was an air of condescension in his voice that I hadn’t noticed before.
God Mode: A LitRPG Adventure (Mythrune Online Book 1) Page 27
