Boss Battle - Cerberock (1)
Five days had passed since we'd begun clearing the C-class dungeon Hell's Gate.
In that time, Sonic had been steadily climbing levels, finishing off the monsters I softened up for her one by one. She'd gotten fast enough that a kill now took her about a minute.
She still couldn't handle a straight one-on-one. Her level had risen, sure, but her stats hadn't caught up to match it.
Even so, considering it used to take her nearly twenty minutes to put down a single Hell Underling, the progress was nothing short of remarkable.
Raising Sonic in earnest would have to wait until the rest of the party's stats were maxed out.
The whole reason we were still sitting at 4-Star was to push those numbers as high as they would go. Delay the level-ups, lock in the stats. That was the play.
If I could have just swiped a card for Growth Stones the way I had in my last life, none of this would have been necessary. I couldn't. So we were stuck growing the free-to-play way.
Which is why I'd been pouring everything into my own stats and the party's for a while now. Dumping Growth Stones into Sonic the moment she got summoned would have been the height of inefficiency.
Finish the party's stats first. Promote them to 5-Star. Then start investing in Sonic.
Part of me wanted to push every stat to eighty. Realistically, that was a pipe dream.
Way too much waste. Fuckin' waste.
Honestly, I wasn't thrilled with Hell's Gate even now. Plenty of monsters, sure — but far too many of them were regular mobs under level eighty.
You could slaughter the lot of them and still walk away with barely any Growth Stones. Anything below level eighty didn't drop them.
Those Hell Underling bastards were low-level and swarming, which meant I was burning time and stamina in equal measure.
Not exactly my idea of a good time.
But what was I supposed to do?
I wasn't a free man.
That said, becoming Montblanc's subordinate hadn't been a total loss. We didn't have to hunt for dungeons, and we didn't have to pay usage fees to whatever king or queen ran the local city.
For all the complaining, we'd spent the last five days grinding this place and stacking stats.
The result: Sonic was now level fifty-five.
And we were standing at the threshold of Hell's Gate's boss room.
"Everyone ready?"
"Yeah."
"Yes, Master."
"Oralisa'll knock down the ugly one, Master!"
I ran through one last check of the party's condition in front of the boss room.
We'd cleared the entire path the day before, so we hadn't fought a single battle on the way here. Everyone had enough dungeon-clearing experience under my lead that they'd managed their own condition perfectly without being told.
They were spoiling for a fight — practically vibrating with the urge to get at the boss already.
"....."
One of us, though, was in a distinctly darker mood. Not a person. A Fairy.
"Sonic. You know how I feel about this, right?"
"...Yes. I know. It just... it hurts, not being able to help you and the others."
Sonic would not be joining the boss fight. She hadn't been participating in combat to begin with, but today I wasn't even letting her into the room.
Unless a boss happened to have some special condition that worked in my favor, there was no way to fight one the way we'd been fighting everything else — with one eye on protecting Sonic the whole time.
A boss monster wasn't a boss for nothing. It was the strongest thing in the dungeon, the equivalent of a city's ruling king or queen if you translated it into human terms.
Overwhelming physical power. Unpredictable, outlandish skills.
And given that every mid-boss we'd run into so far had come with an area-of-effect basic attack, the odds were high that this one had the same setup. Bringing Sonic into that room was out of the question.
Leaving her outside the dungeon instead of just outside the boss room wasn't an option either. A swept dungeon was safer than whatever was waiting beyond it. You never knew what kind of enemy might show up out there.
Same principle as not sticking your head out from under the covers. The world outside a cleaned dungeon was the dangerous one.
"I know it's hard. Just hang on a little longer. And..."
I stroked her hair and dropped my voice to a whisper.
"To celebrate clearing the dungeon, I'm going to work off all that pent-up tension tonight. Thoroughly."
"...Waiting is actually what I do best. I'll be right here. Don't get hurt. Come back to me in one piece, Master."
The moment I put the emphasis on thoroughly, the gloom vanished like it had never been there. Sonic was back.
"Shall we?"
"Yes!"
I clapped her on the shoulder, gathered the party, and stepped through the portal into the boss room.
On the other side of the portal was a place steeped in the same dank, malignant air as every other chamber in this dungeon — only worse.
An ashen sky. A nauseating mix of scorched air and acrid smoke. Dark crimson flames rolling in slow, hungry waves. Bone fragments scattered in every direction.
Every last detail of the boss room was an omen, and not a single one of them was good.
One thing, though, seized our attention so completely that everything else fell away.
"...Good lord."
Directly ahead of the portal stood a door. A massive, staggering door — so vast in both height and breadth that we felt less like insects in front of it and more like single cells.
"Is that... is that actually a door?"
Kanisia pointed at it, stunned by a scale none of us had ever seen. I nodded.
"You think they called this place Hell's Gate for the scenery?"
"What? Then... you're saying that thing connects to Hell?!"
"That's right."
I nodded, deadpan, and Kanisia's eyes went round as saucers. It was a completely inappropriate thought for the moment, but those rabbit-wide eyes made her look painfully cute.
"Alan! Doesn't that mean we're in danger? What if that door opens?!"
Kanisia — who I'd have called a tough, take-no-prisoners kind of woman — had gone pale. She was terrified that the gate would swing wide and Hell's creatures would come pouring through.
"What are you so worried about? That door isn't actually going to open."
"...Huh? It doesn't open?"
"No. How is it that you know less about dungeons than I do?"
"Really? It really doesn't open? You're sure?"
"Yes, you idiot."
I burst out laughing at the blank look on her face.
If that gate genuinely opened and the things on the other side came flooding out, there was no universe in which this place would be rated C-class. A site like that would be flagged S-class and put under the watch of the strongest people around.
In other words, the gate that had just scared Kanisia half to death was set dressing. Atmosphere. Nothing more.
Grrrrrrrr...!
Apparently we'd been making too much noise for its taste. The dog planted squarely in front of the gate let out a rumbling growl and rose to its feet.
Sleek, Doberman-cut muscle. The kind of animal you'd look damn impressive walking around with — if you ignored the fact that it stood three meters at the shoulder and was wreathed in dark crimson fire.
That was this dungeon's boss.
Same star rank as the mid-bosses we'd been fighting — but this one was a different animal, the same kind of case as Gigaesingwan, the boss of the Catacomb dungeon we'd cleared before.
A 6-Star monster sitting right on the edge of 7-Star.
Put a number on it and you'd call it 6.5.
And as the name advertised, the boss was a descendant of Cerberus — Hell's most famous gatekeeper.
Yes. That Cerberus. The one from Greek myth.
The three-headed dog. Meaning you could get a blowjob in triplicate.
"Whoa!"
Oralisa spotted Cerberock and let out a delighted little gasp.
"It's a poopy puppy! Master, look, look! It's got poop on its head!"
"Pfft— what? A poopy puppy?"
Looking at a dog several times her size and slapping the cutest possible name on it... I could never quite tell whether Oralisa was genuinely innocent or just not thinking at all.
Then again, that was half her charm.
For the record, there was not actually poop on its head. The flame sitting up there just happened to be shaped like one.
Flames all over its body, though... Dual attribute?
I pulled my focus back in — Kanisia and Oralisa had let the tension bleed out of the room — and started reading the boss.
Montblanc had already briefed us, so I knew the official profile. That didn't mean it was as accurate as what I could pull together myself.
I was a former top-twenty PvP ranker in Korea who'd run a YouTube channel on Fairy Masters. Reading a fight was what I did.
Anyway. Back to the point. Every so often, a boss in Fairy Masters came with a dual attribute — Dark and Fire at the same time, or Light stacked with Water, that kind of thing.
According to Montblanc's intel, this one only had Dark.
But was it really a single attribute? Then why bother wrapping the thing in fire?
"...Aquaril."
"Yes, Master."
"You're on point."
"Thank you, Master. I will live up to your expectations."
I put Aquaril — Water attribute — on the vanguard for cleaner information. If the boss really did carry Fire, her attacks would hit it hard.
We built the formation around her.
Against a pack of mobs, a small party like ours had to set up to hold the line. A boss room was the opposite. If the boss summoned adds, you'd still play defensive — but when the room held nothing but the boss itself, you flipped the script.
Abraham took position at Aquaril's side. He was the tank; he'd be charging in with her.
Kanisia, Oralisa, and I lined up behind them. We'd open with ranged skills, and if melee looked like it would hit harder, Kanisia and I would push up.
"Then... I'm going in!"
Aquaril exploded forward, her feet hammering the scorched earth as she launched herself at Cerberock.