The Slime King

Field bosses that had already been cleared—and cleared plenty of times—had their strategies neatly laid out on the community info board. One visit was usually enough.

The Slime King, in particular, had been among the very first field bosses taken down in Haven's early days, and by now so much had been made public that a glance at the guide told you exactly what it did and what it was about to do. I'd read it myself.

For starters, the Slime King came in several attributes. It respawned as one of them at random, and the way you fought it changed with the draw.

The Flame Slime King was simple enough to picture: a massive slime, red from end to end, a jelly that was actually on fire. The Frost Slime King was the opposite—frost through and through, blue, breathing a cold that looked like it would freeze you on contact. Then there was the Lightning Slime King, the nastiest of the lot for beginners and the nastiest overall, lightning-attribute from the first spark.

Whichever of the three you drew, that attribute alone was already treated as its own phase, and players ranked the difficulty accordingly.

"Ah. Frost today."

"Electric's the counter, right?"

Even before it spawned, the weather over the Slime King's respawn point changed. A blizzard slammed into us the moment we stepped in, the cold immediate, so we already knew we were dealing with the Frost Slime King.

Attribute aside, most of its patterns were the same. Call it a field boss if ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠you liked—it was still an entry-level monster at level 11, and the creature itself was so simple it couldn't have been anything else. A slime with neither arms nor hands. Get as big as you want; how much more can you really do?

Even so, you couldn't let your guard down. Knowing the patterns well enough meant you might not get hit. It did not mean the thing would go down easy.

Boss monsters and field bosses alike split into phases that triggered off HP percentages and ran set patterns. That part wasn't so different from any other game, which actually made it easier. Until its health dropped past a certain line, it wouldn't do anything beyond what the public info already covered.

A string of simple patterns, sure. That didn't mean there was no danger in them.

It was an enormous slime. Ranged was comfortable enough, but anyone in melee could never quite relax. Hitting it up close didn't even feel like a real impact, and if you got sucked in, your HP would be in tatters before you knew it. The attribute didn't help either—stand too close and you took damage, little by little. Watch for that, and Phase 1 was something you could get through.

Phase 2 was the counterattack from a Slime King that had spent all of Phase 1 just getting hit. Compared to the first phase, nothing about the king itself changed. It was still slow, still huge, still a punching bag and nothing more. What changed was that the further its HP fell, the more it split, and the add slimes spread in every direction.

You could kill the adds. In the end, though, you still had to drain the Slime King, and the faster you drained it, the more adds there were. Each one of those adds was a real threat on its own, and there came a point where the whole field turned into a slime farm.

Back in the day it hadn't been that dangerous so long as you kept an eye on the adds nearby, and people just killed it anyway. Now that everything had been figured out, it was a different story.

Truth be told, next to other field bosses the Slime King was a sandbag with absolutely nothing else going on. There was a reason every Haven player told you to hunt a Slime King for your first field boss.

And that was where the guide ended.

Which was why, when it came to killing a Slime King, most players recommended the grind.

It was a method that cost a little time. You had to keep hitting the King Slime as the King Slime while also killing every add, and that ate a while. But it was safe in equal measure. When it roared, there was no HP left to recover, so you might even kill it faster than if you'd ignored the adds and just wailed on it.

Of course, a somewhat seasoned raid—a field-boss raid whose levels were already decent—sometimes recommended a different approach.

I'd read posts like that, so I made the call without hesitation.

"So we just burn it down?"

"Yeah. We'll probably be done after a single roar."

Lim Sarang was an expert in her own right. It had been a long time since she'd killed a Slime King, but she was a veteran who'd been progging it since before the pattern guides even existed, and she took the strategy in at a glance.

"And your skills are all AoE anyway, Siwoo, so the add slimes might just die on their own. If not, you can toss a few at them."

"Right. I'll go with Fireball."

Ice and fire were a matchup. More precisely, fire was weak to water, water was weak to lightning, and lightning was weak to fire—an interlocked triangle. It didn't matter to me. I had a word that made me absolutely untouchable, elemental advantage, so the chart could say what it liked. Fire was weak to water, and even so I still picked up a twenty-percent bonus damage effect.

Fwoosh—

An enormous Slime King took shape.

"Ugh. It's freezing."

The temperature had dropped below freezing, and all around us a hundred players braced for the fight.

"At this rate, it won't even get a mouthful."

"I'd like that."

I closed out the point bet on the streaming tools.

‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠

The wager itself was simple.

Windy Streaming automatically banked Windy Streaming points for viewers based on watch time. Just by tuning in to a streamer you liked, they piled up on their own, and you could spend the stack on all sorts of perks—bolding your chat on that broadcast, highlighting it, that kind of thing. If the streamer set out a prize, you could buy it with the points you'd gathered.

I'd only learned about it recently, and today was my first time trying it. I hadn't been streaming long, so nobody had stockpiled a huge personal balance, but with over three hundred thousand viewers an absurd amount of points got wagered in a blink.

I was surprised to see the bets tilt so hard to one side.

"Think 75% is going to be rough?"

"Mm... once a field boss goes over a hundred people, the channel splits. Haven doesn't really have a channel system, but the field-boss site turns into something like a dungeon. You walk into the same place, except each group enters a different Slime King's dungeon."

"Ah."

That explained it. The players who'd shown up to hunt the field boss had looked like several hundred at a glance, and if every one of them piled onto a single slime there'd be more meat than water. The thing would have melted.

"So they'll get mixed in pretty evenly, but today's average level looks awfully high..."

"Getting to 75% might be iffy, then."

"I still bet on possible!"

"Of course you did. Lay the buffs on thick. I'll win you those points."

The King Slime respawned.

A blue body. A long stalk rising from its head, crowned with a round blue orb. Eyes burning in the shape of a cross, and no feet at all—just a body that bounced and hopped. It was, unmistakably, a slime.

There was no signal. The instant it appeared, everyone launched the attacks they'd already prepared.

I was no different. I sent Fireball out on a penta-cast.

Messages for the other spells cascaded up after it, but this wasn't the moment to care about any of that.

Twenty seconds of buff time. I had to empty my mana inside it.

KRAK-KRAK-KRAK-BOOM!

The opening Phase 1 sandbag window. And when those twenty seconds ran out—

"H-huh?"

"What?"

KYAAAAAAAH—!

The Slime King roared.