Volume 2 Chapter 7.2

Chapter 7.2

Translator: Einbedo

Editor: Weasalopes

「Well, there you go.」

「I reckon a change in plans would be appropriate?」

「But of course.」

If there’s anything that last exchange solidified is the fact that they had effectively ballparked Hiroshi’s relative location. So long as they didn’t run into any boss along the way the journey should be smooth sailing.

「This card is confusing on so many levels, I don’t even know where to begin. We can facetime fellow party members but not see their location? What sense does that make.」

「It doesn’t even have a map function to begin with, can you believe that?」

Haruna hopped on the bandwagon. What both of them failed to realize is that the facetime function already made it remarkably more technologically advanced than most of what was available out there .

「If it did have a map function the adventurer’s association couldn’t make a quick buck peddling the widest array of maps known to man to unsuspecting victims.」

「That would certainly explain it.」

The adventurer’s association dealt in hand-drawn regional and dungeon-specific maps. They weren’t just any old scribbled on sheets of parchment paper either, they were put together with the blood, sweat and tears of all those who suffered an untimely death exploring each of those areas. Their brave sacrifice wasn’t in vain either as those maps assisted greatly in decreasing avoidable casualties all across the board.

The association was by no means against the idea of including a party member tracking system or a map function but in doing so the manufacturing process would become much more cost and human resource intensive as a result. It still had a chance to become a reality if not for the fact that the association was run internationally and every state, naturally, had their best interests in mind and throwing in those two extra quality of life functions would only serve to degrade the card’s cost to performance ratio.

In a similar vein map sales rolled in the dough like crazy so it wasn’t too conspiracy nut sounding to say that it was in the self-interest of each state to maintain the current state of affairs or, at the very least, not actively go out of their way to change it.

「Anyways I think it’s pretty safe to say that we should prepare to get in a scuffle or two on the way there if we take Hiroshi’s word for it.」

「So long as the monsters aren’t too overbearing I think we’ll be just fine, although I hope there aren’t any traps because I’m no good with those.」

「You’re not the only one.」

Up until this point they’ve managed to steer clear of any overly complex traps but how long their streak of luck would last only god knew. Being painfully aware of their own ineptitude at traps they chose to laser focus their attention towards directly above and below them since traps at these spots were particularly difficult to maneuver out of. If anything was to come from the sides they just hoped that a combination of a fast reaction speed and protection magic would do the trick, an idea which only really worked if the traps were few and far in between but that wasn’t the case. The vines had been frequently harassing them in random intervals without any intent of causing harm. This slowly chipped away at the laser focus they had going and made them realize just how valuable of an asset Mio really was to the team.

The whole area being one fluid tapestry of nothing but all the different shades of green in a palate made it feel like they were making no progress what so ever but they managed to overcome that by measuring their level of exhaustion and basing distance covered off of that.

「Hiroshi’s got a working pair I’ll say that much.」

「Why worry about traps when you can just brute force your way through walls as if physical boundaries were a mere suggestion.」

「What really gets me is how his first instinct was to take the least conventional approach without any second thoughts what so ever.」

「Tell me about it.」

For the most part it’s not the greatest of ideas to go about tearing down every wall in sight without taking the structural integrity of the dungeon into consideration. This kind of reckless behavior would be bad enough on its own right, what made infinitely worse is that Hiroshi, in his day to day life, was the poster boy for taking things nice and easy.

「I can sense something.」

「I can faintly feel it in the air as well. Where is it coming from?」

「Over there.」

The two had already covered a great deal of ground with a few insignificant encounters interspersed here and there when they came face to face with

「Is that a man eater?」

「Without a doubt, but there’s something off about it.」

「My best guess would be that it soaked up enough miasma to mutate in size.」

「Most likely.」

A humongous carnivorous plant taking up the entirety of the pathway through its sheer size alone. It had all the telltale characteristics of a man eater – a jumbled mess of undulating wines firmly attached to an even firmer stem that was responsible for shouldering their weight, a deep pitcher for digesting unsuspecting prey and thick roots. What set it apart from your average man eater was the size. It resembled a boss more so than a regular mob.

「How powerful is it?」

「In terms of raw power it should outperform a piaranork, but not any one of Barold’s doubles.」

「In short?」

「It’s beatable but the matchup heavily favors it.」

「Is it because of its large effective range and attacks per second?」

Haruna nodded to Tatsuya’s inquiry. A playstyle like Haruna’s that revolved around dodge tanking for survival is largely ineffective at dealing with attacks dished out in rapid succession. To add insult to injury its effective range was somewhere in the twenty meter department, while Haruna had to get up close and personal to deliver max dmg. Getting into melee range was possible if she went in gung-ho with a complete disregard for coming back out in one piece but the valiant sacrifice would go vain if the man eater turned out to be non-stationary.

「In that case, here goes nothing.」

Tatsuya, having reaffirmed the fact that Haruna was unable to keep up with her usual dmg output, considering the circumstances, decided that’d it be best to just smack their head against the monster repeatedly and see what works. He stood right outside the entrance and casted grand napalm. To no one’s surprise he landed a direct hit, although it really didn’t do much in terms of dmg because intermediate level spells had a significantly harder time punching through the natural defenses of a boss than something like an advanced level one would. What was important, however, is that it wasn’t completely resisted.

「Oh no you don’t!」

Haruna knocked him out of the reach of danger and made quick work of the vines that made their way towards the entrance in retaliation. This little sequence of events served one very crucial purpose – it revealed the boss’s effective attack range, which was just short of the entrance.

「Thoughts?」

「I think my attacks are largely innefective. I barely managed to bust through the surface and it’s already beginning to regenerate.」

「Very well, in that case…」

He began casting one of his highest single target damage spells – the holy octo-cannon. The spell was of an entirely different caliber from that of the grand napalm and if the latter managed to just barely punch through the boss’s defenses the former would have absolutely no problem tearing them into shreds. The man eater’s vines wallowed in pain as the attack chunked a third of its health bar in one fell swoop. As it stood Tatsuya had the greatest one shot potential out of the entire group, going as far as surpassing Makoto.

Except for the very rare instance where the stars align just right for Haruna to bust out her Elemental dance, which would blow Tatsuya’s holy octo-cannon out of the water in terms of raw single target dmg. There was a catch, as there always is with abilities that sound too good to be true, in that there was an off-chance that it would just straight-up knock the caster out unconscious. That’s why it has only been used once in their entire journey and that was only because they knew the enemy’s skillset like the back of their hand. If they didn’t and the enemy was to give them a taste of the unknown the whole encounter could have ended really badly.

「It still hasn’t begun regenerating.」

「There’s more where that came from!」

Just as he had finished waiting for the ability to come off cooldown Tatsuya had his cast interrupted through displacement.

「What in the-」

「Tatsuya, the walls!」

Tatsuya promptly turned his head only to see that the wall behind them had slowly inched its way toward them and showed no signs of stopping. They had no means of tearing it down, which meant that in due time they were about to be physically shoved into the boss’s room with no means of escape. After a short while this became reality.

「Figures it wouldn’t just stand by letting us take potshots outside its range.」

「We managed to put a considerable dent in its hp bar, I’ll consider that a one for team us and a zero for team oversized tentacle brain over here.」

Haruna took stance making sure Tatsuya was safely positioned behind her and began an attempt at bolstering morale through some pep talk. Tatsuya nodded in agreement and began cooking up a different spell while waiting for his main nuke to come off cooldown.

「If only I had gone all out with the nukes and learned something like Armageddon or implosion.」

「Realistically speaking how often would you even be in a position to use them to be worth the time investment?」

Tatsuya grumbled despite having mastered one of the single strongest nukes obtainable by conventional means. Armageddon was a powerhouse of an aoe nuke but it came with its own set of drawbacks. For one its radius was much too large and it only got larger with mastery and spell power bonuses which would be all fine and dandy in an mmo where friendly fire wasn’t a thing but alas, that wasn’t the case here. Secondly It’s cd, mana cost and cast time were set so high that using it for a second time in all but the most drawn out of battles was not a feasible feat. The third and final drawback isn’t so much of a drawback as it is an exploration of the human mind’s tendency to get overtaken by delusions of grandeur and believing that the world is at their mercy just because they’ve won the nuke equivalent of a dick measuring contest. This can be easily confirmed by all the players who, being drunk of their feet with power, attempted to clear an entire area full of high level mobs, only to have said mobs survive with a sliver of hp and proceed to beat them into a bloody pulp because they had wasted all of their resources.

Implosion, on the other hand, was the single strongest single target nuke in the game, within the confines of general skills, that is. Whereas Armageddon was an explosion that’s inherently directed outwards Implosion was directed inwards, which made it easy to tell which was aoe and which was single target at a glance. Since it didn’t have to be balanced around being aoe its damage output was close to rivalling that of certain extra skills. It was, however, highly situational with its fifteen second cast time and ludicrous mana consumption that would only allow itself to be recast a second time by players with mana pools as large as Mio’s. As such it was only ever used as an initiating ability for when one was able to get the drop on whatever mob they happened to be fighting that also warranted using it.

Due to these less than minor drawback the number of people who’d bother spending their time learning them were few and far in between and the one’s that achieved mastery on them were even rarer. The number of them that got to use twice or more in one battle were in the lower single digits, reserved for only the top most no-lifers ever known to man.

「Whatever I’ll just dispose of it with hell fire sanctum.」

Tatsuya figured that the natural plant weakness to fire along with the cleansing properties of fire when used against miasma would make for a double whammy, thus hellfire sanctum. While it didn’t quite match up to holy octo-cannon’s damage number it did manage to meet expectations as was evident by the vines wallowing ever harder than before. Just as he was about to follow that up with a fireball, which would finish casting by the time holy octo-cannon got off cooldown, the man eater caught them off guard with an abrupt change in strategy.