Betrayal
Good thing I warned them beforehand.
Without Jin-soo's warning, far more players would already be dead.
So the core is in the spine, or the breastbone.
Had it sat in the neck or the skull, a headless torso could never have moved with that kind of freedom. The severed head, still trailing a few vertebrae, writhed like a snake and snapped at the players, but its mobility had been pathetic from the start. Undead instinct still drove it to tear into the living, yet cut off from the core it could neither loose a breath nor unleash the roaring curse that made its other attacks so lethal.
Destroy the core, or this doesn't end.
The only other path was to wait until the Bone Dragon's mana ran completely dry, and the odds were overwhelming that the players' mana would fail first.
"Its neck is gone and it's still fine? What the hell is this!"
"How are we even supposed to kill that thing?"
"It was never meant to be killed! We were reckless!"
The morale that had surged the instant Jin-soo took the Bone Dragon's head collapsed just as fast. Head and body were split, and still the dragon raged on, pouring out the same crushing curse as before. Faced with that, most of the players lost the will to fight.
"Then what — you want us to run?"
"That'd be smarter!"
"We almost had it! Walking away now would be a waste!"
"Almost had it, my ass! The mana pouring off it hasn't dropped at all!"
"He's right! And the curse keeps stacking!"
"If we don't run now, we might never get another chance!"
Players who had charged into the raid drunk on the promise of sweet spoils broke completely once cold reality struck them.
"So we just give up? Like this?"
"Don't you feel anything for the guildmates who already died?"
"Then die with them!"
"The mages and healers are about to run dry! We don't have a chance!"
"I'm done!"
Opinion split in two, and of course the side that wanted to abandon the Bone Dragon raid was vastly larger. No hope was in sight, the dragon's assault never let up, and the curse stacking over them was a crushing burden.
This is bad.
Jin-soo frowned. His own mana was nearly spent. Among the Shadow Summons, the Shadow Mage and the Shadow Healer had almost nothing left. The Shadow Knight, Shadow Warrior, Shadow Assassin, Shadow Archer, and the Army Summons still had mana to spare — but the moment the players pulled out, the line would collapse.
The foreleg.
He poured a furious assault into the foreleg the players' concentrated fire had already shredded. Retreat was the louder opinion, yet the fight itself had not stopped. Baekcheonsingeom, the blade that carried Skill Nullification, erupted in pure white aura and slammed into the Bone Dragon's foreleg with a thunderous crack.
Weaker than the rest of it. Definitely.
Jin-soo drove in with Baekcheonsingeom and the Blood-Sucking Sword both. His mana was on its last breath, though, and the aura streaming from the twin blades grew thinner by the moment.
"It's over. It's over."
"Yeah. I don't think we can do this."
Once the players realized Jin-soo's mana was gone, their spirits sank even further.
"Let's push a little longer."
"Smash the foreleg and we've still got a shot."
Cripple its mobility, and victory was still possible. Jin-soo and the players wrung out what mana they had left and never stopped swinging, and his summons gave everything they had as well. The giant spiked boar hurled its bulk in a body slam. The variant lycanthrope tore and raked the foreleg with fangs and claws. A sickening crunch — and one foreleg came free.
Balance gone in an instant, the Bone Dragon's massive body crashed and rolled across the ground.
"Waaaaah!"
Morale, which had been in the dirt, shot back up.
"Now! Focus fire!"
"Good thing we didn't quit!"
The players squeezed out their mana and hammered in. Then the Bone Dragon, still under that concentrated assault, planted tail and hind legs and heaved its enormous body upright. Hind legs and wings lashed out.
"Aaagh!"
"Guh—!"
Slowed by the curse, several players were crushed under a hind leg or run through by a wing, and died.
"What? It's fine?"
"We should've cut a hind leg, not a front one."
"We barely managed one skinny foreleg! How are we supposed to cut something that thick?"
Head gone, foreleg gone, and the Bone Dragon still standing — the players' will to fight shattered completely.
"Retreat! Fall back!"
"Stay and we all die!"
"Run!"
Some of them abandoned the fight and chose flight. With fewer targets, the Bone Dragon's strikes began to land, and the losses among those who had stayed snowballed.
"There's no chance left!"
"We're pulling out too!"
Even those who had resisted to the last broke and fled in a rush.
"Daehan Guild is retreating as well! Come with us!"
Kim Young-cheol's voice was urgent.
"I have no intention of giving up."
Kim Young-cheol looked thrown.
"Your mana's gone. How do you expect to hold out? Before the curse weighs your body down any further, you should retreat—"
He never finished. Pure white mana streamed from Jin-soo's body in thick ribbons.
"Huh?"
Kim Young-cheol's mouth fell open. A moment ago Jin-soo had stood in armor with two swords in hand. Now he wore a robe and carried a staff. That was not the end of it. The summons that had burned obsidian black vanished, and in their place stood summons radiating the pure white of fresh marble. The white mana pouring off him turned to biting cold. A storm of frost crashed over the Bone Dragon, and in the same instant the white summons charged.
"Wh-what is this?"
The man before him had become someone else entirely, and Kim Young-cheol was badly shaken. So were the players already in retreat.
Switching from his dark-affinity status window to the holy one, Jin-soo's condition was restored to its peak. The heaviness left his body. Mana that had been utterly empty was full again. He attacked with Dragon Tooth Soldiers and Army Summons called through those skills. He did not summon the ant-maw colony, and of the Dragon Tooth Soldiers he called only the nine forged from White Drake teeth.
Summoning the ones made from lizardman teeth, or the ant-maw colony, would just waste mana.
Neither was particularly strong. Numbers were their only advantage, useful against a mob and nearly useless against a Bone Dragon. Here they would burn mana and give little back.
Ice Storm
Ice Burst
He spam-cast his attack magic. His immense mana and mental stats, the support of his blessings, and the cold amplification of the Staff of the Ice Dragon all stacked together, and the colossal Bone Dragon turned to a block of ice in an instant. It shattered the ice anyway and swung its ponderous body at him. Jin-soo slipped aside with ease and swept the staff. A wing-bone spearing toward him like a lance struck the Staff of the Ice Dragon and exploded into bone dust, ricocheting away.
"Hah—!"
Kim Young-cheol's jaw dropped at the sight. Jin-soo paid him no mind. He kept dumping skills and swinging the staff, hammering the Bone Dragon without pause, while the nine Dragon Tooth Soldiers born of White Drake teeth and the six Army Summons pounded the dragon's body with savage force. His target was the spine.
"Ha — I'll fight with you!"
Kim Young-cheol changed his mind. The players who had been edging toward the exit began to waver.
"What do we do?"
"Should we join in?"
"Quitting still seems smarter."
"I'm out."
"You go. I can't walk away from this. Not after everything we've already spent."
They split again. Some rejoined the fight to aid Jin-soo. The rest retreated as they were.
A shame.
Those leaving vastly outnumbered those who stayed. Barely three hundred remained.
Still. Better than none.
It was a mercy that anyone at all had chosen to stand with him, accepting the stacked curse and the very real chance of death. Jin-soo spent mana without restraint, casting attack magic in a steady stream. Coldly speaking, even restored to perfect condition by the switch from dark affinity to holy, he had no certainty he could beat the Bone Dragon. He meant to take it anyway.
Worst case, I use Ouroboros's Greed — the option on the Ring of Ouroboros.
Whether the option would even function properly in a clash with his blessings, and whether those blessings could offset the side effect, he couldn't be sure. Even if he had to eat the loss, the raid had to succeed.
The feat and the items are tempting, sure.
What mattered most was this: the raid was his only chance, on Floor 100, to turn a monster of the Bone Dragon's caliber into a summon. The Dragon Tooth Soldiers and Army Summons drove stubbornly into the dragon.
"Eat this!"
"Just die already! Die!"
The players who had chosen to remain beat on it with everything they had.
It's working.
Jin-soo's cold-attribute magic had dulled the Bone Dragon's movements. Its remaining mana didn't look abundant either; the defensive skills wrapped around its body were winking out one by one. Attacks from Jin-soo, his summons, and the players finally landed without being canceled. Even so, strip away those skills and the Bone Dragon itself was simply too hard. They still couldn't land a fatal blow. And it wasn't only the dragon that was weakening. Everyone but Jin-soo was being driven toward their limit by the stacking curse and the drain on stamina and mana. The healers — Shin Sua among them — were stretching the gaps between their healing and purification longer and longer. You could feel it.
If the healers run dry, it's over.
Without healing and purification, they would be left naked to the Bone Dragon's curse.
I end this before their mana is gone.
Jin-soo drew his mana up to its maximum.
Ice Piercing Arrow
He formed a volley of them and loosed them all at once into the Bone Dragon's spine. They punched in — not deep, but deep enough.
The Bone Dragon's spine detonates.
A tremendous blast, and half the spine blew apart. The body that had stood so firmly on hind legs and tail lurched, then collapsed to the ground.
"This is it!"
"Focus fire!"
The players swarmed the spine like a hive, and Jin-soo kept casting.
"Kraaaaaagh!"
The head, still crawling along the ground, roared and lunged, a mouth full of razored teeth snapping at the players. The torso thrashed legs, tail, and wings in violent resistance.
"Don't fall back!"
"Hit it harder!"
Jin-soo and the players wrung out the last of their mana and stamina and attacked without mercy. In that moment the spine shattered completely. The Bone Dragon split into an upper body, forelegs and wings still attached, and a lower body of hind legs and tail.
Done.
Jin-soo's face brightened. This was why he had aimed for the spine and not the breastbone.
Even if the core was in the breastbone, a body hacked into three pieces can't put up a resistance that means anything.
He gathered what mana remained and prepared another attack, just in case. He didn't need it. The mana and the curse flowing through the Bone Dragon vanished as if washed clean.
The raid on Floor 100's Out-of-Spec Monster, the Bone Dragon, was a success.