One-Click Carry

The viewers were asking.

"Huh? Did it roar?"

"...?"

They were asking me, sure, but that didn't mean I could answer. I was seeing the Slime King for the first time myself. I glanced sideways, and Lim Sarang shook her head.

"I don't..."

"Hmm..."

We weren't the only ones caught off guard, and neither were the viewers. The users on site had noticed too, and a murmur ran through the field.

"What the hell?"

"This is phase two, right?"

"It roared, though."

"A roar, the second the fight starts? Since when does it come out immediately?"

"I mean, I was dumping damage pretty damn hard."

Everyone knew how this was supposed to go. Before you even stepped into a field boss, one look at the users' setups gave you a decent estimate of how long the fight would take, and they had all known this one would be over extremely fast. Plenty of people who had already graduated from the Slime King had shown up on my stream specifically to try to out-damage me. This, though, they clearly hadn't seen coming.

"...Let's just DPS for now."

"No way that was actually the roar."

I agreed with them. The Slime King was a field boss, ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠a raid built for a hundred players. Dump damage hard enough at the start and a well-geared raid could slip into phase two quickly, but that only held for a true, hardcore damage-check party. A raid that had actually gathered a hundred people dead set on doing a proper damage check? There had been exactly one. They had piled on the ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠damage the instant the field boss began, and about a minute later, right as everyone's mana ran dry, they had flipped into phase two all at once. Was this that kind of thing?

I threw magic of my own. It detonated in a chain of booms. My mana hit the floor, but the empty mana potion bottles already littering the ground rapidly filled it back up. The Slime King, now unmistakably smaller, came bouncing straight at me. I didn't dodge. I trusted the Moonlight Protection layered over me once again, and another barrage went off.

Somehow I had the feeling I didn't need to dodge. If anything, I poured even more magic into it.

And then, with a heavy thud, right in front of me, the Slime King collapsed.

I wasn't even sure collapsed was the right word. Its body, already shrunk to less than half, had been splitting apart, and now the motion stopped and it flopped loose across the floor. Anyone looking at it would have called that a collapse.

The message announced that the raid was over.

"That's a lot of EXP."

Three levels, all at once.

The chat never stopped climbing. Less than a minute after the fight began, the Slime King had roared, and that roar, it turned out, had been the phase-three roar. I was stunned too.

I genuinely hadn't thought this was possible. High specs or not, I was still only level 12. Could one person really put out this kind of firepower against a field boss that a hundred people were meant to raid? On top of that, Crescent Moon's Blessing hadn't even crit. Only the 200 percent had applied. If the 410 percent had procced, what would have happened then?

And when I looked back through the message log, one strange entry was mixed in among the rest.

"Huhhh?"

I didn't even know what kind of magic Ignition was. Replaying that moment, I hadn't had the focus to check every message as ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠it appeared. All I had done was wring my mana dry and hurl Fireballs. One of them must have surfaced in the middle of it, and Ignition was probably the single biggest reason phase two had been skipped. Everything else that had been summoned was mostly magic between levels 1 and 30, and not even all of it was attack magic. Defensive spells had gone off, and so had magic that was completely useless in a fight.

And just like that, the raid was over in less than five minutes.

An absurd record, one that would carve another line into the history of Haven, was written again today, and with that, it was done.

The average Slime King raid ran about sixty minutes. That figure assumed a party made mostly of users between levels 11 and 20, the crowd that showed up to farm the Slime King, and even then it was for runs stuffed with complete beginners. Once more experienced users made up a larger share, the time could drop as low as forty-five minutes.

Part of that was simply the field boss's absurd pool of HP, but it was also tied to how the Slime King worked. Most guides had you clear the add slimes safely before you committed, and that alone ate more than twenty minutes. After a roar, you dealt damage on a timer, then stopped DPS after three minutes and took time to handle the adds. Two hard minutes of clearing little slimes, another look at the roar, then back to damage. You shaved off more HP than the healing those absorbed adds restored, and that was how the thing died.

So a Slime King clear was usually graded by how many roars you had witnessed: a one-roar clear, a two-roar clear, and so on. The so-called damage-check raids, parties that saw a single roar, ignored the adds, and could burn 20 percent HP inside five minutes, could finish as fast as the thirty-minute range.

Eighty-nine percent. A damage share that overwhelming, with no precedent before or since, threw everyone into confusion.

A few users had even shown up with an analysis of why.

In truth, the Burn effect hadn't drawn much attention until now. Two percent per second. Any Haven player knew how broken that was, but down in the level bracket where Kim Siwoo was playing, a raw Fireball simply dealt far more damage than 2 percent a second. Monsters died in a single hit before the damage over time could even tick. When would anyone ever feel 2 percent per second? Only against an HP sponge like the Slime King did it finally shine. Even then, it was hard to shake the thought that the raw damage might have mattered more.

Sooner or later, a moment would come when Kim Siwoo's options ran into their natural limits. Other people, though, were worried about something else entirely.

What would Kim Siwoo look like once he had a badge on? Everyone went quiet.

The replay uploaded today was shocking all on its own.

That day, a single image made the rounds across the community: melee damage dealers scrambling to stay behind the enormous Slime King as it moved, and far off in the distance, Kim Siwoo, casually picking his nose, flinging magic and declaring the carry.