Bone Dragon Raid (3)
"The center force is nearly spent. We should start preparing the rotation."
Kim Young-cheol said it while readying himself for battle, neatly turning the conversation aside.
"Honestly."
"The Bone Dragon raid comes first. We'll have to let it go."
"Young-cheol, you and I ought to have a drink later. Just the two of us."
Sensing that Kim Young-cheol had no intention of answering them, the guild leadership filed down into the battle basin.
This is going to drive me mad. Kim Young-cheol was burning with the very same curiosity. It's not as if I actually know anything. All he had was that Jin-soo was an exceptionally skilled summoner. I'm curious too. Even so, he had no thought of pestering Jin-soo just to scratch the itch. They hadn't gotten off to the cleanest start, but Kim Young-cheol and the Daehan Guild still had a relationship with him, and set against the other guilds—who didn't even know Jin-soo's name—that was an enormous gain.
If I had my way, I'd hand over my own seat just to bring him into the Daehan Guild. He knew full well that Jin-soo wanted no affiliation with anyone. Best to keep things exactly as they are. If he kept what he knew about Jin-soo to himself and went on building that rapport, chances to work together would come, just as they had with this Bone Dragon raid.
"Then let's move."
At Kim Young-cheol's word, the center force withdrew and the rear force went in.
Smooth. A smile bloomed on Jin-soo's face as he watched the center and rear forces trade places. The fight against the Bone Dragon was proceeding without trouble, and the Players' rotation was going off without a hitch.
Gear really does carry you. That his attacks were landing meaningful damage on the Bone Dragon—and that he was holding the tank's role on top of it—owed something to his high stats and skill levels, but the real weight lay in his items. Baekcheonsingeom, bearing the monstrous option of Skill Nullification, ignored the Bone Dragon's defensive skills outright. The Black Dragon's Cursed Armor Set, riding its high level, cut most of the creature's attack power away. His other items and skills, all sitting at the lofty level of 722, were pulling their weight in the raid as well.
The curse is a nasty one, though. Even the Ring of Revival and the Ring of Recovery, both at level 722, could not purge the curse the Bone Dragon scattered as a passive. Thank god for the synthesized skill Curse Absorption Recovery, and for Curse Devourer from the Black Dragon's Cursed Armor Set. Even those two, however, could not shut the curse out completely. But I have Shin Sua, the holy saintess. Her Cure and Purification, arriving in real time, wiped clean whatever Curse Absorption Recovery and Curse Devourer failed to digest.
If the raid keeps going like this, we'll take it down cleanly. What mattered was mana and stamina. Jin-soo refused to burn skills that devoured mana the way magical attacks did. He stuck to class skills that sipped only a little—tank, warrior, assassin—and put everything into holding the line. There are more than enough Players to deal the damage anyway.
The archers loosed arrow after arrow of every element until their hands blistered. The mages rotated out to recover mana, then rotated back in to hurl offensive spells. Among the melee damage dealers, those stacked with curse and drained of mana and stamina fell back, while fresh fighters joined the assault. Jin-soo's summons were earning their keep as well. From the opening of the fight until now, the Shadow Summons and the Army Summons had poured an unrelenting storm onto the Bone Dragon, and the Shadow Summons—scaled to Jin-soo's stats and blessings—along with the variant lycanthropes, were especially ferocious.
"Eat this!"
The blow detonated.
"Big as it is, there's no shortage of places to hit!"
Bone cracked and split. The top Players of each guild were putting on a respectable showing of their own. Kim Young-cheol poured out streams of crimson aura and smashed the Bone Dragon's foreleg, and with a thunderous blast part of the bone powdered and scattered on the wind. The guild master of the American Alliance, the guild master of Alsani, and the other elites kept landing meaningful damage with their signature skills.
"Krrrrng!"
The Bone Dragon, which had been thrashing to catch Jin-soo, went still.
"Aggro's dropped! Watch out!"
"Focus! Focus!"
The Players sharpened their senses as one and braced for whatever came next.
What's this thing doing? Jin-soo triggered his taunt and, in the same breath, swung Baekcheonsingeom and the Blood-Sucking Sword in a furious assault, doing everything he could to drag the aggro back onto himself. The Bone Dragon did not so much as move. It's concentrating mana. Power was gathering at its maw, condensing fast. Is it going to breathe? He set himself to dodge the Decay Breath.
The condensed mana detonates—a roar thick with cursed power.
Curse spreads across the shrunken safe zone.
"Aaaagh!"
"My ears! My ears!"
Players nearby clutched at ears streaming blood. That was only the beginning.
"Guhk!"
"M-my body won't move!"
"My head's going to split!"
"Aaaaargh!"
A powerful curse wrapped their bodies. The problem is the safe zone shrinking after the city walls came down. Had the safe zone been intact, the area of effect would never have reached so far. Reduced as it was, the cursed roar caught not only the Players in the fight, but those who had fallen back to recover stamina and mana.
Rapid Recovery
Purification
Cure
The healers cast at once, treating injuries and following with Purification and Cure. But there was a hard limit to how many holy-attribute healers could use those skills, and they could not reach every Player.
"Krrrrng!"
A tremendous crash answered them. Worst of all, the Bone Dragon did not stay still. Tail, forelegs, and wings swept through the Players still flailing in the curse's aftermath.
"Guhk!"
"Aaaagh!"
Fighters who had battled so bravely died without so much as a struggle, hollow and sudden.
I have to stop it. Jin-soo had taken the powerful curse as well, but Curse Absorption Recovery, Curse Devourer, and Shin Sua's care arriving in real time had already shaken its influence off him. He drew up his mana and charged. Baekcheonsingeom bit into the Bone Dragon's neck bone—and the creature ignored the blow, wholly occupied with slaughtering the Players around it.
"Fall back!"
"Stop dawdling and get out of there!"
The guild leadership ordered a retreat. The Players wanted to obey. They couldn't. The curse had locked their bodies.
"Damn it! Die!"
"Hyaaaah!"
Blows landed, bone cracked. The top Players, less touched by the curse, hammered the Bone Dragon with everything they had. It ignored them and hunted only those the curse had left unable to move.
So the crushing defeat before the Regression wasn't for nothing. Jin-soo ground his teeth. He had thought the raid was going more smoothly than expected, and he had never imagined the creature would take what he had assumed was a passive curse, amplify it through a roar, and spread it. He swung Baekcheonsingeom and the Blood-Sucking Sword in succession, hammering the neck bone.
Disgustingly hard. Bone shattered and shards leapt, but the thing was simply too massive. Breaking the neck itself would take a great deal more pounding. The Players still able to fight concentrated everything on the forelegs.
"Kyaaaang!"
The Bone Dragon twisted its neck and gaped a maw lined with razor teeth straight at Jin-soo. He launched himself clear. The jaws crashed shut on empty air, and the Bone Dragon swept its foreleg, counterattacking the Players still pressing it.
Can we even kill this thing? Jin-soo's face darkened. Tanks and melee damage dealers still standing under the curse were dropping fast. At least the mages, healers, and archers are intact. The archers, maybe. The mages and healers had already burned through a great deal of mana. Their mana and stamina will run out before the Bone Dragon falls.
The Bone Dragon was hardly unscathed. Cracks ran through its bones, and beside the majestic thing that had first appeared, it looked thoroughly battered. The neck and forelegs, the focus of Jin-soo and the Players' assault, hung in tatters, ready to tear free. The problem was that for an undead Bone Dragon, injuries of that degree were no real obstacle. A living creature would have bled out, or at least slowed. This one fought with no difference between the moment it had been whole and the wreck it was now.
I have to take the head before my mana bottoms out. Right now, that was the only hope.
"Kraaaang!"
Its resistance was fierce. Once the melee damage dealers thinned sharply, the Bone Dragon lashed the ruined city wall with its tail and rammed it with its head. Stone groaned and gave. The wall crumbled further, and the safe zone shrank at speed.
"Kraaaang!"
Smashing the wall as it came, the Bone Dragon turned on the healers, mages, and archers stationed above it.
"Wh-what?"
"The Bone Dragon's coming!"
"If the wall falls, we all die! Fall back!"
"Get back!"
"Get off the wall!"
The archers, mages, and healers who had been supporting the melee from the stretch of wall where the safe zone still held retreated in a rush. If the wall collapsed, they would be crushed beneath it. Even if luck spared them, the safe zone would vanish, and there would be no dodging the Bone Dragon.
Why is this thing so intelligent? Jin-soo checked Shin Sua's position and frowned. Undead monsters moved on hatred of the living and the instincts of their former lives, and most of them had nothing you could call a mind. A dragon's a dragon, even rotten? Perhaps because it had been born bearing the soul of a true dragon, it moved with far more cunning than an undead had any right to—breaking the troublesome city wall first, spreading its curse to retire most of their force, and now pressing the attack with healers, mages, and archers at the top of its list.
I'll make you regret that. Setting priorities had been a good choice. Leaving Jin-soo and the surviving top Players alone was a price it would pay. He poured out streams of pure-white aura and blood-red aura, hammering the neck with even greater fury.
By the time his vast mana was nearly spent—
Baekcheonsingeom, streaming pure-white aura, destroys one of the Bone Dragon's neck bones completely.
"Kraaaang!"
With the Bone Dragon's scream, the enormous skull tumbled helplessly across the ground and struck with a heavy boom.
"Waaaaah!"
"We won!"
"We finally got it!"
The moment Jin-soo severed the neck, the Players erupted in a victory roar.
Damn it. Unlike the cheering crowd, Jin-soo's expression was anything but bright.
He shouted the warning. Head and torso had separated, yet the immense mana and cursed power pouring from the Bone Dragon's body had not diminished in the slightest. Split apart, the undead's characteristic immortality kept it from vanishing. The headless torso rampaged, attacking the Players.
"Aagh!"
"Dodge!"
Something slithered across the stone.
"Kyaaaang!"
The skull that had tumbled across the ground worked what remained of its neck, crawling like a snake, jaws gaping as it bit into the Players.