by Rachel Aaron
“It’s not what it looks like,” James said, reading the despair on her face. “I’ve talked with him. I know Ar’Kan has a really good poker face. He’s capable of playing the evil raid boss, but I know he doesn’t actually enjoy making others suffer. Never forget: he thinks he’s doing this to save you. He must be having more trouble than he’s letting on, or he would have killed all of you already to put you out of your misery.”
Tina supposed it was nice to know the Once King wasn’t drawing their suffering out just for laughs, but that didn’t change the fact that they were going down. “Then what do we do?” she asked her brother, grabbing her shield off the ground to get back into the fight before Frank nearly died for a third time.
“Call his bluff,” James said. “Stop letting him control the fight and force him to do something big. If he’s faking as bad as I think he is, he won’t be able to take it.”
She almost asked, “And if he’s not?” but there was no point. She already knew the answer, so Tina gave James a thumbs up and hurled herself back into the fight.
“Richard!” she yelled, running back toward the center of the battle-scarred terrace. “What’s our mana status?”
“At the current rate of burn, DPS should have fifty percent remaining on average,” the Sorcerer officer replied calmly, pausing to sling a fireball through a gap in the melee line. “Healing is most likely down to twenty-five, give or take a few percent.”
That was better than she’d feared. “Okay, new plan,” she said, grabbing the beanpole Sorcerer by his shoulder to stop his next attack. “I want you to take all the casters and get them over there.” She pointed at the far side of the mountaintop, the farthest point of the circle from the Great Pyre. “All the casters, including healers. Get everyone together and start team casting like Neko and Anders do.”
Richard looked intrigued. “What’s the spell?”
Tina forced a confident grin onto her face even though she had none. “I want you to make me a magical storm. I don’t care if it takes all our mana, I want every last watt of lightning, fire, and holy power we can scrape together, and I want it to be a big area-of-effect attack. Think ‘orbital nuclear strike.’”
This description earned her a frown. “We can probably manage something like that,” Richard said. “But it’ll take sixty seconds at least to gather so much power, which means the Once King will almost certainly interrupt us. Also, targeting will be impossible with so many casters. It’s a matter of when, not if, we’ll lose control of the attack. Even if we did somehow keep it together, the sum total of our remaining mana isn’t close to what’s needed to kill him. Even if we do everything perfectly, we’ll be left with an only half-dead boss and no mana for heals.”
“That’s fine,” Tina said. “I’ve already got it covered. You just focus on getting everyone together to blast him with as much AOE bullshit as possible. I’ll take care of the rest.”
The Sorcerer looked doubtful, but he followed her order, yelling and waving his hands as he ran over to the remaining healers. Satisfied he’d do his part, Tina turned to look for her next target, who turned out to be only a few feet away.
“Zen!” she cried, running over.
The Ranger officer didn’t stop firing to answer, “What?”
“Do you have any super-speed left?”
“I’ve got all of it,” she said as she calmly fired an arrow through the six-inch-wide gap between two Knights to graze the Once King’s shoulder plate. “Why do you ask?”
“Because you’re about to need it,” Tina said, pointing at the basin of burning elves sending tongues of ghostfire high into the overcast sky. “I want you to go stand by the Great Pyre and hurt it as hard as you can. Make yourself unignorable.”
Zen almost dropped her bow. “Are you crazy?” she cried. “The Once King will swat me like a bug!”
“Then don’t let him,” Tina said. “I know you can see as well as I do that this shit ain’t working. If we don’t shake things up, he’s just going to keep knocking us down until we can’t get up anymore.”
Looking at the tiny scratch left by her own arrow, Zen’s face grew grim. “So you want me to get his attention by shooting the ghostfire and…what? Dodge and hope for the best?”
“You are a goddess of Agility,” Tina reminded her. “Unlike Assassins, Rangers don’t need to pack on Strength for stabbing. You’ve got more jump than even SB. If anyone can pull this off, it’s you.”
Zen sighed. “This is crazy,” she muttered. “But I guess last stands always are.” She took another deep breath, reaching up to push the sooty green hair out of her face. “When do you want me to go?”
“Right now,” Tina said, looking nervously at the battle raging behind them. “Before he kills Killbox.”
That was going to be a tall order. The Once King had already grabbed the Berserker by his chestplate, trying to hold the wiggling human steady long enough for a decapitation. “Crap,” Tina said, gripping her shield as she started to charge. “Do it, Zen!”
The Ranger was at the pyre before the order was out of Tina’s mouth. The moment her first arrow hit the ancient elves whose bodies fed the flames, they all had to duck as the Once King whirled around. He dropped Killbox a heartbeat later, launching himself at the dark-skinned elf with his lightning speed. Zen moved just as quickly, jumping out of the way and spinning in midair to launch yet another arrow into the pyre. This one burned up before it could land, but the shot still struck true. With a roar of fury and maybe a flicker of fear, the king charged after her, beating his wings as he ran to pick up speed until the two of them were just a blur. The other Roughnecks—including Killbox, who was still lying where the Once King had dropped him—watched the chase in awe. They would have sat there forever if Tina hadn’t started banging her shield.
A sea of panicked, bloody faces whirled on her, their eyes too full of battle adrenaline to properly follow an explanation even if she’d had time to give one. Fortunately, they didn’t have the time, so Tina didn’t even have to try.
“Assassins here!” she ordered, pointing at the stone under her feet. “Knights form a line twenty feet behind them. Berserkers, I want you twenty feet behind the Knights. Frank! You’re twenty behind the Berserkers. Rangers, you’re back with the casters. Keep the flak in the skies. If he tries to fly, shoot him down!”
The raid stared at her dumbly, and Tina banged her shield again. “Move, people! This is not a drill!”
Everyone leaped after that, scrambling into the positions she’d just laid out. As the lines formed, Richard finished gathering all the casters at the far edge of the terrace. Very close to the edge. It was a dangerous position, but it was the only place far enough back to work. If she was going to pull this off, Tina needed as much HP between the Once King and the casters as possible.
“Listen up!” she bellowed as her raiders fell into line. “This is our final play, so use it if you got it! Cooldowns, potions, buffs, everything is cleared! Our only goal is to keep him off the casters until they finish their spell. Any way we can accomplish that is a good one, so go for broke!”
With that, Tina moved into her own position twenty more feet behind Frank, which put her practically in the caster camp. This close, she could feel the first rumbles of the magical storm building behind her. Setting down her shield, Tina picked up a ten-foot length of the enchanted chain the Once King had broken earlier and wound the end around her right arm. When everything was exactly as she wanted, she looked up to see how Zen was doing.
She tried, anyway. Her eyes weren’t actually good enough to keep up with the deadly game of cat and mouse going down on the other side of the terrace. The Ranger was moving so fast that she seemed to flicker between footsteps, only touching ground once every few seconds. But the Once King was just as quick, slashing his empty hands through the air only a hair more slowly than she vanished. The only reason he wasn’t able to slash her was because he had to keep pausing to snatch the arrows she continuously loos
ed at the Great Pyre out of the air. Other than the painfully close shaves, though, Zen’s gambit was actually going spectacularly well. Tina was starting to think they might not even need the rest of the plan because the Ranger could distract the king the entire time on her own.
Then, suddenly, Zen’s speed gave out all at once.
The Ranger must have hit her limit face first. One second she was flickering through the air, the next she was gasping on her knees, her dark-brown face turning a terrifying shade of purple. Her bow hit the ground next as Zen clutched her throat, gasping for oxygen. Then the Once King appeared in front of her, his fist already pulled back for the finishing blow.
Tina was sucking in her own breath to bellow at the Assassins to get Zen out of there when lightning cracked overhead, bathing the entire mountain in blinding light. Even the king stopped at the flash, buying SilentBlayde enough time to flit in and drag Zen to safety before slipping back through the shadows to resume his position. He certainly had plenty to work with. The always-dim Deadlands sky was now black as pitch over their heads, the clouds low and angry and full of unnatural flashes, only some of which were lightning. There was also fire and water and golden holy light, plus whatever the weird purple stuff Sorcerers cast was. All of it was swirling together over their heads in a black, cloudy vortex. There was so much magic in there that even Tina—who’d never had mana as a stonekin and not much now—could feel the weight of it building like a hammer in the sky.
The Once King definitely felt it. All at once, he forgot about Zen and turned, his gaze fixated on the circle of casters at the opposite side of the terrace. Then his wings beat down once, shooting him up into the air straight at them.
“Here he comes!” Tina yelled as the gigantic elf rocketed skyward. “Rangers, get him down here!”
She didn’t even need to say it. Her archer gallery was already firing, shouting out their damage-boosting cooldowns as they launched their biggest shots straight at the Once King. Even for the world’s best raid boss, it was a staggering amount of damage. More than he could take, clearly, because the king swooped back down almost immediately, putting himself back in range of the rest of the Roughnecks.
Being the closest and the fastest, ZeroDarkness and SilentBlayde got to him first. “Shadow Dance!” “Flying Blades!” Her two Assassins called out their abilities as they turned everything on, leaping onto the falling Once King with blades that moved so fast Tina couldn’t even see them. After being left out of the chain attack earlier since they couldn’t stand in the conflagration of spells without being consumed themselves, both Assassins were fresh, and they laid all of that saved energy into the Once King.
The winged elf fell to the ground with a crash, his blood flying everywhere as he defended. But even with his hands flickering at max speed and sparks flying from his gauntlets from the hundreds of parries, even he couldn’t stop it all. Plenty of hits got through before the Assassins ran out of speed just as Zen had.
“Fifty seconds, Roxxy!” Richard yelled.
Part of her knew that was important, but the rest of Tina’s attention was focused on the Assassins, both of whom she could now see again as their speed and defenses ran out. As they wound down, the momentum flipped back to the Once King’s side. Moving as fast as ever, he flitted around Zero’s parry to plunge his fist into the jubatus’s chest, dropping the Assassin in a single, near-fatal hit. His foot moved at the same time, crashing into SB’s crossed blades and sending him flying. Blayde almost saved it, flipping in midair with supernatural grace, but the Once King wasn’t done. As he flew through the air, the winged elf’s hand flicked down to the ground, grabbing a piece of the shattered floor and winging it at him like a knife. The stone, which had looked so small in the king’s oversized hand, crashed into SilentBlayde like a cannonball, smashing him to the ground with a force that shook the mountain and nearly broke the floor again.
Crying out her husband’s name, Tina rushed forward, only to stop a second later. She couldn’t go. SilentBlayde was writhing in the crater a good thirty feet away, but he was still alive. So was Zen, panting on the stairs where SB had dropped her. They’d need serious healing, and soon, but as of right now, no one was dead, and she meant to keep it that way.
Forty seconds.
“Knights forward!” she yelled as the Once King started toward the casters again. “Don’t let him through!”
“Blades of Glory!” the Knights bellowed in reply. “Steady Ground!”
Just like the Assassins, the Roughnecks’ Knights gave it everything they had. They’d always been a melee-heavy group, but that normally bad comp finally worked to their advantage as the whole pack of armored players crashed into the Once King like linebackers, swinging their swords with all their overgeared strength. For a moment, the impact was enough to check even the five-skull boss’s strength, forcing him back several feet. Then the king filled his hands with pure concentrated ghostfire, swinging the flaming mass like a bat into the knot of armored muscle pinning him in.
To their credit, Tina’s Knights didn’t give up. They threw themselves at the Once King, weighing him down with their bodies even as he bashed their armor and broke their swords. In the end, though, even their strength wasn’t enough. A few heartbeats later, the king bashed himself free, leaving them bleeding and wreathed in ghostfire as he staggered forward.
Thirty seconds.
“Roxxy!” NekoBaby cried, making her jump. She hadn’t realized the healer was back in action yet, but when she looked, the Naturalist was standing in the casting circle with everyone else, weaving her magics frantically. “They need heals! Do you want us to—”
“No!” Tina cried, forcing the word out. It went against every instinct she had not to call for healing for her downed raid members, but this was the plan. It was all or nothing. If she chickened out and broke the casting early, she’d gotten everyone hurt in vain.
“Stick to the plan!” she bellowed. “Berserkers in! Don’t let him through!”
The building magical storm crackled over head as the last group of her melee rushed in. “Reckless Strikes! Dogs of War!” came the callouts as the Roughnecks’ Berserkers crashed into the increasingly desperate Once King. Metal screeched on metal, men roared in pain, weapons shattered, but no one backed down. They weren’t as armored as the Knights had been, but that didn’t matter. Killbox and the others stalled the king with their sheer fury, swinging their weapons like whirlwinds so fiercely that even the Once King stepped back. But no player ability lasts forever. When their cooldowns were up, the king overpowered them as he had all the others, breaking through their line with a savage arc of blood and broken bones.
Twenty seconds.
Sweat poured down Tina’s neck as the Once King reached Frank.
“Iron Wall! Last Stand!” Frank yelled, slamming his shield into the ground as he set himself like a boulder in the king’s way. Sneering at the off tank, the Once King drove his shoulder into Frank’s shield. The resulting impact should have hurled him off the mountain, but for once Frank had set his shield at the exact right angle, tilting the metal wall so that the force of the blow traveled down into the ground instead of into him. A gunshot-like crack rang out as the stone under his feet broke, forcing both Frank and the Once King to jump away as yet another hole opened in the floor.
Whooping with victory, Frank reestablished his position, banging his shield to taunt the boss back to him once more. Any other time, Tina would have been beside herself with pride. Now, though, she could only watch in terror as the Once King roared with impatience, gathering the ghostfire once more into his hands to slam it down on Frank’s head. Again, though, Frank got his shield into the right position, using what was left of Iron Wall to fend off the blows. But, like all of their techniques, Iron Wall’s perfection was short lived. Tina knew to the heartbeat when it would run out, and as it did, so did Frank.
The moment the Knight’s ability was no longer holding his shield in place, the Once King knocked it wide o
pen. But in a move that shocked even Tina, Frank was ready. The moment the Once King knocked his shield out of the way, Frank charged in, using his own broken guard for a surprise tackle that took the Once King off his feet.
“Go, Frank!” Tina yelled, heart soaring. “Get on top of him! Punch his face!”
Frank was trying to do all that and more, but while the tackle had caught the Once King off guard, he was still a raid boss, and Frank was just one man. A single hand was all it took for the king to pluck the shieldless Knight off his chest, crushing his body in an iron grip before throwing him away. Frank landed in a fresh crater right next to SB’s, wrapping his arms in pain around what had to be a whole chestful of broken bones. Nodding in satisfaction, the Once King rolled back to his feet and turned on Tina, the last obstacle left between him and his goal.
Ten seconds.
Tina met his sneer with her own and raised her shield, ignoring the blood that was still trickling down her face from the many, many hits. This was it. Her raiders had given every inch of themselves to reach this moment. She would not be the weak link here at the end. She would not fail them.
With that, Tina roared her battle cry and charged straight at the king. The massive elf met her head on, forming the ghostfire in his hands into a blade as big as she was as he swung for her chest. But not being a stonekin anymore had its advantages. Using the Once King’s own blinding attack as cover, Tina ducked and rolled, slipping between the raid boss’s legs to come up behind him instead. When she reached the other side, she spun and threw the enchanted chain she’d picked up earlier, slinging the barbed end around the enormous elf’s waist. The moment the other end came back to her hand, Tina grabbed the chain and wrapped it around herself, locking them together.