The Boss That Wouldn't Fall
Eighteen hours. That was how long it took, after Raider officially launched, for the first boss to be found.
The one who found it was, of course, a Korean player. Korea is the primary habitat of the bunny tryhards. If anything, eighteen hours counted as holding out for an impressively long time.
With the boss's location stripped bare before all under heaven, everyone assumed it wouldn't be long before someone took the thing's head. And yet here they were—three days past launch, and now into the fourth. Word of a first boss clear still hadn't come.
On Märchen's fan cafe, the board where posts respawned fastest was, without question, the Raider board.
Obvious, if you thought about it. This was the cafe of a streamer who posted every scrap of Raider info without fail, shared Raider memes without a hint of stinginess, and, whenever she held a fan-art contest for herself, held a Raider fan-art contest right alongside it. Raider talk, missing from that cafe? When the game had only just opened?
Naturally, the air on the Raider board had no choice but to run hot. And if you asked anyone to pull the single hottest topic off that freshly blazing board—
It's literally telling us not to kill it yet lol
You're telling me a maxed-out Yurie owner still hasn't seen Yurie's story? Even if it means giving up the Furcle, you watch Yurie's story first. No exceptions.
It was the boss.
If the one from the closed beta had been a coffee-break of a boss that never even received a proper name, the boss showing its face for the first time now was, in a word, the apex itself. Far richer patterns. A boss AI of a much higher caliber. A spec gap that stopped the breath in your throat. And the plain reality that players who had finished raising even one full party were still a vanishing minority.
Stack those together, and you got the result: a boss that had revealed itself eighteen hours after launch was still unkilled. A boss everyone had expected to fall quickly, standing its ground without budging—that was exactly the sort of subject fit to catch people's attention.
"The boss Furcle still hasn't come in…."
Märchen was no exception.
I had given up on the boss Furcle. And there were reasons for giving it up.
If you meant to kill a boss faster than anyone, a Kyeonwang—streaming straight through until the thing was dead—wasn't a choice. It was a requirement. Had I not been booked for vocal training, I would have declared one. But the vocal lesson sitting two days after Raider's launch had me by the ankle.
What if I stayed awake for forty hours, the way I had on the last Kyeonwang? Would I even get up on time the day of the lesson? I could set an alarm and still sleep straight through it. Worse, that same day was my first meeting with my assigned manager. However dead serious I was about Raider, I was still an intellectual in possession of common sense.
Show up with Sorry, I stayed up all night gaming and I'm late to an extremely important first meeting—mind pushing it back? They could curse me out coming and going and I wouldn't have a word in my defense. That's being a nuisance with the lights on.
If the CBT boss had still been sitting there, the story would have gone very differently. But the moment I saw that the CBT boss was gone, I cleanly abandoned any glory the Furcle might have offered, went to vocal training, and came back.
"The boss Furcle still hasn't come in…."
I thought I had given it up. But if the Furcle still hadn't appeared even now—part one of the stream over, part two just beginning—
"…How much XP do I even have banked?"
My heart had no choice but to waver.
I logged straight into Raider and checked the experience I'd accumulated.
"Let's see…. Two max levels are locked in for sure, and if I push a little more I can just about see a third…."
Three characters to a party. A level gap of twenty. Far worse conditions than when I'd killed the CBT boss. I sketched it across the canvas in my head and read the odds. A twenty-level gap was something I had never experienced. Just how monstrous would it actually be?
"…I'm not confident."
"No, I just don't have the confidence."
I knew it. The wider the level gap, the more vicious the spec gap became. There was probably a level correction doing the work. Against the CBT boss, fifteen levels down, I had gone three damage and one heal just to scrape the damage up somehow. A twenty-level gap? I wasn't even sure the hits would land. Could the power of a wallet close a gap of five levels? Could it patch the weakness of a three-person party?
…You never really know which is longer until you lay them side by side.
"I'll run into it once and see."
The road to the boss is a brutal one. How brutal?
Level-40 mobs pop out often enough to be a nuisance, and take one wrong turn and you can personally greet a mid-boss pushing level 48. To get through, you have to punch across the Thorn Tree Mountains. And the Thorn Tree Mountains are, true to the name, a range where thorn trees grow. Walk into a neighborhood like that without a healer, on nothing but nerve? The thorns keep pricking you, shaving your health away a nibble at a time, until you simply depart this life.
Slipping past the trash and forcing the mountains is not the end of it.
Take the correct path through the Thorn Tree Mountains and a magnificent castle comes into view: the Ruler's Citadel. At the heart of that citadel lies a space called the Sanctuary, and today's objective—the boss—is waiting there.
So then. Break the Ruler's Citadel, and enter the Sanctuary. The problem was that every trash mob haunting the Ruler's Citadel was level 50.
"…Yeah. I really should stamp one of them to 40 first, shouldn't I?"
For the record, my party levels at the moment were Tequiel at 30, the protagonist at 14, Comyu at 22, and Yurie, last of all, at 1. Even if this party somehow scraped through the Thorn Tree Mountains, breaking the Citadel on top of that was out of the question. Setting everything else aside, the time and sanity it would cost just to kill a single trash mob were far too precious to waste.
Which left the question of who to raise to 40.
"Yurie, the advantageous pick? Please. She's Yurie. Obviously we go Tequiel."
What, an AoE looks like a children's toy to you? And when the stats came up short, there was the handy fact that I could hit pity and punch straight through. No debate required. The leadoff batter was Tequiel.
"There are definitely people challenging the boss even at this very moment, you know? …I'm the latecomer here, so I'll throw the romance out and push as fast as I can."
I said it, and in the same breath I started to run. The destination I had marked glittered against the black of the map.
Shhhk. Shhhk. Shhhk.
A dragon in service to a great king was whetting its sword. It worked a massive greatsword against a massive whetstone without rest, drawing the edge ever finer—silently, at an unchanging pace, though the greatsword was already as keen as a blade could be.
Then, little by little, the world outside grew noisy. Bewilderment, fury, hatred, fighting spirit—emotions surging out there spilled over in such excess that they reached even the dragon. But the dragon did not stop whetting its sword. It did not waver.
How much time passed after that?
Someone stepped into the dragon's domain. Eyes that had held nothing but greatsword and stone lifted, and confirmed the intruder. The dragon ceased its sharpening. Slowly, it rose. In the same moment, the intruder closed the distance.
The sword in the intruder's hand was wretched beyond measure beside the dragon's own. The presence rolling off them was frail—set against the dragon's spirit, a flame that seemed ready to gutter out at any second. Putting them to the sword felt almost like a luxury.
Even so, the dragon took up its blade.
And———