Dark Mage Cliches 1
A centaur cavalry unit came thundering across the plains, kicking up great clouds of dust, their charge full of murderous momentum. This was the 60th Floor — the final floor of the grassland tier, and home to its boss monster — and they seemed determined to prove it with every pounding hoofbeat.
Grace's warning had given us time to spot them, and the first thing that jumped out was how dramatically their numbers had swollen. These weren't the kind of enemies an adventuring party could handle in the first place — people already called them an army — and now they looked to be roughly one and a half times larger than before.
Ah. So that's why the Goddess had gone out of her way to quest us into bringing the Ice Cross Knights along. Quantity as a design concept was common enough in RPGs, but living through it was still pretty goddamn miserable.
"What the hell is that? They're carrying something on their backs."
"Goblins? Even so, those are pretty big. Are they actually running a real mounted unit?"
"They might throw bombs — or use magic, or shamanism. Everyone stay sharp!"
Sure enough, goblin-like creatures dangled from the centaurs' backs.
Ordinary goblins were green-skinned dwarf monsters about the height of an elementary schooler. The ones riding those centaurs were a size larger — middle-to-high-school height, with unnaturally elongated arms.
The viewers immediately started arguing that oversized goblins meant hobgoblins, but if you wanted to be precise, these weren't hobgoblins either. They were mutant goblins crafted through black magic.
And what those mutant goblins did was, of course, ranged attacks via throwing. Just as goblin infantry got stronger with orc grenadiers attached, the centaur cavalry had picked up goblin slingers and turned into a kind of mounted archer corps.
Which is to say: those long arms whirled leather slings in humming circles and hurled stones straight at us.
"O Goddess, grant us your protection!"
A hit from one of those would have shattered a steel helmet without breaking a sweat. But a plain stone throw with no mana behind it was never going to punch through a Candidate Saintess's barrier.
Still, the sheer volume kept it threatening. Fist-sized rocks hammered the brightly glowing veil of holy power like a rainstorm, and without that shield, I couldn't help thinking two or three of the knights would have had their skulls cracked open and been rushed straight into emergency treatment.
"They're still just goblins! Trust in the Sacred Protection and engage — it's no different from the lower floors!"
"All hands — chaaarge!"
Irene's Sacred Protection completely ignored chip damage; it could have blocked stone throws for hours, for a lifetime even. Even so, the enemy's momentum was vicious enough that the Ice Cross Knights' faces went rigid as they surged forward.
They'd been dismissing the centaurs as lower-grade trash compared to the northern monster waves — and then they'd walked straight into a stone barrage. My assessment that two or three of them would have cracked their heads open without Irene's holy magic hadn't been far off.
Nearly getting knocked out by a rock from mid-tier fodder — mutant goblins, no less — after taking them lightly was the kind of thing that put serious dents in a knight's pride. So as the knights scrambled forward in a hurry, Irene layered each of them with a simplified Sacred Protection.
"Aside from the slings, they don't look that different."
"No — they're bigger, and more muscular! Individual specs are up, so don't get careless!"
"They're still mid-tier that can't even use Aura — hah!"
Dozens of centaurs carrying stone-slinging goblins slammed into twenty-one high-ranking knights pouring Aura in continuous streams. The result was an overwhelming victory that barely needed describing.
Even if the centaurs had bulked up and grown larger, extending the reach of their spears and blades, Aura-wielding knights weren't about to lose to that. And even if the goblins on their backs had freakishly developed arms for vicious stone-throwing, they weren't punching through a Candidate Saintess's holy magic.
Their attacks didn't land. Ours landed far too well. A completely one-sided damage trade. If the Demon King were a player or a gamer, this was the kind of situation where he'd spit out extreme praise like, "Bro this game is fucking cracked."
"Huh — what the hell is th—?!"
"Bombs? Those are bombs — get down!"
But the 60th Floor was never going to be that easy.
One Ice Cross Knight's sword carved smoothly through a centaur's neck. He gently caught and deflected a spear thrust driven out at full force with the charge, ran his blade up the shaft to slash the wrist, then pierced chest and throat in sequence — elegant swordsmanship from start to finish.
Having cut through spearhead, shaft, wrist, chest, and neck without losing momentum, the blade whipped through a new trajectory in midair, aiming for the centaur's back as the body began dissolving into a magic stone—
The instant the centaur it was riding died, the long-armed mutant goblin discarded its sling without a shred of hesitation and clamped both hands on the belt at its waist.
"Self-destr—! Hit the dirt!"
"These bastards have explosives on their belts!"
"Not explosives — magic stones! Magic stones! They're different from a grenadier's weapons!"
Kiiiiiiiing——!!!
In the same breath, a purple flash that blanked out vision and a blast that left ears ringing scrambled every sense.
Ice Cross Knights — total strength twenty-one. Casualties: one wounded.
"Ugh, of all the humiliations — you had to take it from a goblin?"
"It wasn't a goblin! It was an explosive magic stone!"
"Yeah, but a goblin pulled the trigger. So you got done by a goblin. Don't go throwing the order's name around out there — it's embarrassing."
If it had been the Sacred Protection Irene cast on herself, it might have held. The simplified barriers she'd layered on each individual knight, though, couldn't fully stop a chain of goblin self-destructs.
The goblins had hop-hop-hopped onto the most exposed man at the front of the charge, clung on with those elongated hands, and daisy-chained detonation after detonation after detonation until the simplified Sacred Protection finally shattered — and the knight inside got himself neatly roasted.
That first casualty, born of stacked bad luck, was now getting thoroughly roasted by his comrades in a different sense. Even with the Sacred Protection broken, it had blocked most of the blast's force, so the injury wasn't serious enough to stop them from ribbing him lightly.
Leading the charge only to become the target of a group roasting — truly unfair treatment. But in any group of twenty-odd men, that was just daily life.
"These things… the color of the magic stones is weird."
"The goblins'?"
"Not just the goblins — the centaurs too. If you look closely… see? They're purple."
While the Ice Cross Knights cheerfully tormented their freshly healed comrade, our party started picking up the magic stones scattered across the ground and examining them.
Thanks to a tip from a sharp-eyed viewer, our genius mage Hannah had noticed the stones weren't blue but purple — and once Grace and Katie heard that, they each scooped one up and held it to the sky.
It was such a subtle purple that I had to wonder how anyone had spotted it on a dirt-caked stone lying in the dust. You practically had to hold it up against the sun to tell — but the difference was real. Had some new breed of human with an RGB color analyzer jammed into their eyeballs been watching the stream again?
Still, once you held them to the light, it was clear they weren't blue. So we kept gathering stones and kept talking.
"Purple magic stones… is this what I think it is?"
"What do you mean?"
"You know… the crystals made with black magic were dark purple. So doesn't that mean these freakish goblins and bulked-up centaurs are black-magic-made monsters too?"
What kind of boss was waiting on the 60th Floor?
Spinning wild theories from the flimsiest evidence was always good fun, so everyone tossed out opinions and scrambled the chat. People tended to think along similar lines, though, so the conversation eventually settled into whether the general was the boss and the dark mage the adjutant — or the other way around.
It was interesting enough that the theorycrafting never went cold, flaring back up after every few fights. It helped that every monster on the 60th Floor came pre-enhanced, so the topic kept feeding itself.
Centaurs bulked up for longer reach and bigger strides. Goblin slingers with grotesquely lengthened arms and suicide-bomb belts. Orc grenadiers who'd gone the opposite direction from the centaurs — smaller and more agile, now lobbing elemental bombs. Orc longbowmen who'd graduated past bows entirely, deploying crossbows and even ballistae at their strongpoints.
From the side actually fighting them, the only takeaway was that it was annoying enough to make you want to die. From the viewers' side, the richer spectacle had them cackling with delight.
At least the safe-zone and fake-safe-zone mechanics hadn't changed, so the day on the 60th Floor drifted by in a natural current of irritation and hassle.