Asymmetric Power Effect Confirmed, Whoa
Hello, everyone.
I'm Jasmine, always ready to serve Master.
Why am I so determined to give everything of myself for Master's sake, you ask?
That's quite simple.
It's because I want to serve him — and serving him makes me incredibly happy.
When I'm drunk on that warm sense of happiness, nothing else can enter my mind.
So, how about all of you try living a happy life serving Master, just like me?
Ah, it seems you don't care for that idea. I suppose we should move on to the next story, then.
Today is the day we expect the monster we've been preparing for — Nepenthes — to appear.
For this day, Master and I finished assembling the party specs needed for the boss strategy, and we taught everyone the fundamentals of the clear so they could all learn them. Of course, since none of us had actually fought it yet, there was a high chance things would turn chaotic the moment the real situation arrived. Even so, to protect this Perfumery where we live with Master, we had to make it work somehow.
There had been plenty of problems when we fought in the first Deadly Battle as well. But in the end we successfully defended this place — so I believed we could do it again this time.
"These are the rewards we've been collecting."
"Thank you."
Every member of the Dessert Research Club had already finished unlocking their characters. Since then, whenever they had free time, they'd been running dungeons and funneling resources our way. Given how hard they'd worked helping us alongside Master, it felt like the entire Dessert Research Club wanted to repay us.
"...It's appeared, just as expected."
Last time, the Sand Ghost had invaded by generating sand across the ground. This time, an unidentified plant had grown up, wrapping the surrounding buildings in countless vines and roots. And in the center, something resembling a strange entrance had formed — that was the boss's main body.
When I'd seen it in the game, the design had first struck me as grotesque. Looking at it now, at a size far larger than any of us, "overwhelming" felt like the more accurate word. The main body didn't look like it belonged to a plant at all — it felt more like the mouth of a massive cave.
"Everyone, please get into position."
"Yes."
Nepenthes's Phase 1 was quite unique. It only occasionally swung tentacles of vine or leaf embedded in the buildings to attack. There were no particularly powerful patterns to speak of — it simply sat there. Instead, it had an enormous amount of HP, giving the impression of being extremely tanky. Of course, if too much time passed, it would devour everything in that building, then take the next one as its sacrifice — so we needed to finish as quickly as possible.
Especially since switching buildings also restored its HP.
When the strategy first came out, it had been absolute chaos. No matter how hard you hit it, the fight wouldn't end, and plenty of people flooded the communities asking if it was a bug. Even people who cleared it often didn't properly understand why.
"We're starting. Everyone, please keep checking your positions."
It had all happened because nobody knew about the skill that defined Phase 1 — Seductive Mouth.
That cave-entrance-like part was Nepenthes's mouth, and the closer you got to it, the stronger the buff that increased the damage you could deal. In other words, for DPS characters, proximity meant an exponential damage increase. However, it also periodically used a technique that pulled everything nearby inward. If you got dragged all the way inside the mouth at that moment, it closed shut and you were eaten — an instant-death judgment. So it was an unusual boss where you had to maintain just the right distance, balancing damage increase against survival.
"It's pulling. Everyone, please create some distance."
Honestly, aside from needing to figure that out and having to periodically spend mana to reposition, it wasn't a particularly difficult boss. Considering that — unlike in the game — I could move multiple people by myself, it might even have felt much easier.
...That's only for Phase 1, though.
Phase 2 was different. Only after you'd wrecked nearly all of its HP in Phase 1 did the phase transition trigger. From then on, the mouth put distance between itself and us, and the damage you dealt dropped dramatically. But if you approached, it immediately used its mouth to swallow you whole. So you had no choice but to attack from far away. They must have set the Phase 2 entry HP with that in mind from the start.
Anyway, from that point on the atmosphere didn't feel much different from other raids. The tentacles that had occasionally attacked also sped up in range and frequency, and irregular attacks appeared too — like occasionally destroying buildings and hurling the debris.
"Gourmand."
"Yes, Teacher!"
And of course, among these ordinary patterns, there was something called an instant-kill move. Occasionally, it would bring that head straight over and try to eat you. It was extremely fast, so if you weren't careful you could get swallowed and death-processed before you even thought about dodging. That was why, more than anyone else, Gourmand felt like she absolutely had to take a spot in this raid.
Gourmand's ultimate was a bizarre act of food-waste terrorism — indiscriminately mixing her favorite sweet sauces with savory cooking sauces and blasting out a hellish concoction with a water cannon. Of course, since it was made of mana, it wasn't actual food waste. But the smell was disgusting, and the boss that got hit by it suffered too. So yes — it was terrorism.
"Ugh."
It was a smell that threatened to put me in a status ailment rather than the boss. The boss hit by that attack took a mental shock from the utterly incomprehensible taste and received a Slow status that dragged down its entire behavior. While the Slow was active, every pattern slowed. The attack cooldowns themselves didn't decrease, so the actual damage output didn't drop — but the big advantage was that it bought you time to dodge.
That was why Gourmand, along with other Slow-type debuff characters that would appear later, often had a place against bosses with fast patterns. They didn't need much investment, so most of the time they felt like they were only brought into the party for the purpose of using this one skill. Of course, in my case, putting Gourmand in was itself a DPS loss, so I'd just prayed and relied almost entirely on pure reflex luck to land hits... but that had been purely for maximizing ranking scores. When survival mattered the way it did now, it wasn't a play worth making.
...Honestly, even though I'd done it myself, it had been insane.
"It's coming. Cinnamon, get ready."
"Yes! I'll shoot as soon as I see the position!"
And for similar reasons — Cinnamon.
Cinnamon had a skill that felt like grenades, throwing cookies she'd made herself. It was less of an attack and more of a buff-generation ability: allies who ate them acquired buffs, similar to the ally buffs Minty used. The difference was that those cookies were self-harm items that inflicted countless vicious debuffs. People had openly wondered why on earth a crazy effect that debuffed allies had been attached to it. When Cinnamon's character first dropped, she was treated as straight trash and nobody pulled for her...
...Then this Deadly Battle came out, and everyone beat the ground in regret.
Nepenthes would decide an attack position, then sweep that entire spot with its mouth and swallow it whole. If a buff item happened to be there at the time, it acquired that too. More precisely, looking at how it absorbed every buff on a character even when it ate the character, it probably had that kind of skill. So the moment you figured out the attack position, you evacuated whoever was standing there, scattered Cinnamon's cookies across the spot to force-feed them — and you could weaken the enemy in an instant.
"Target: Jasmine. Dodge."
"Yes!"
And it seemed I was the first target. Well, since I wasn't a DPS, it wasn't as though it was a waste of mana. I immediately spread my Wings to leave the location — but the moment I leaped and opened my mouth, something slipped right into it.
...Huh?
Inertia from the Wings properly pushed me clear, letting me dodge Nepenthes's attack. But the moment I unconsciously chewed whatever had entered my mouth, pain so intense I wondered if I'd already been hit by Nepenthes started flooding through me.
The bitter, disgusting taste of the hard, burnt exterior was a given. And the flavors of the ingredients that hit my tongue after crumbling were sweet, salty, sour, and spicy all at once — every unidentifiable taste imaginable began tormenting the inside of my mouth. On top of that, various scents refluxed up and assaulted my nose: chocolate, coffee, mint, chili peppers, vinegar, rotten eggs, and even the smell of burning. A revulsion that made me wonder if this was what food waste would taste like after being burned and then clumped together slammed into me.
"Jasmine...!"
"Bleh — uweeeegh!"
The taste was so horrific that I failed my landing and tumbled across the ground. As I spewed out curses I couldn't hold back, I felt my somewhat hazy mind snap clear.
Holy shit. I really thought I was gonna die.
It wasn't my first time experiencing Cinnamon's horrific food waste — but this one was a goddamn compressed version of that taste. No wonder the boss couldn't keep its head straight after eating this crap.
...Huh?
Something felt strangely off — like my memories from just a moment ago were floating loosely, untethered. I thought I'd been a little weird ever since receiving the Affection Gift...
Did eating Cinnamon's cookie somehow undo the brainwashing?
I felt like I hadn't been myself until now. Of course, I think I'd tried to keep some boundaries in my own way — but still, feeling bad was feeling bad. How long was this damn Affection Gift planning to torment me?
"I'm fine. Master, please don't worry about me and finish the battle."
"Are you really okay?"
"Yes. I was just startled by how terrible it tasted."
A lot was left unsaid, but it wasn't exactly a lie. I just didn't want to talk about how hard things had been because of the Affection Gift.
...Because if it were our idiot Master, he'd definitely start worrying about me the moment he heard.