Chapter 39 - A Castle on Sand, a Throne in Flux, Part Three
"—Damn it all!!"
By the time Sora broke the fifth scale, I'd long since lost the composure to filter my reflexive cursing. The great serpent had entered a berserk state at the same time, and while it still couldn't catch up to my speed, the fact that it was constantly on my tail meant I was being steadily worn down.
Every time its massive body passed by, I'd dodge the attack itself, but the dust clinging to it would mercilessly chip away at my avatar.
There was no pain, but the horribly realistic sensation of being battered by a massive amount of sand, and more importantly, the countless grains trying to blind me, was the absolute worst.
My virtual body wouldn't be seriously harmed by getting sand, or even mud, in my eyes, but a human will reflexively shut their eyelids when something approaches or touches them.
My opponent was so ridiculously huge that I couldn't possibly lose sight of it, but if I was forced to blink at a critical moment, I'd be run over and that would be the end of it.
…I was feeling pretty proud of myself for holding out solo, but could a proper party even handle this? Can a fully-specced tank actually withstand this walking natural disaster of a boss…?
If we manage to get through this, I'll have to look up a guide video or something. As I mentally escaped reality, I used a deployed dagger as a foothold to execute a triple aerial twist before batting away the incoming tail blade with my great axe.
Using the momentum of the swing, I tossed the axe aside. With my free hand, I pulled a recovery item from the belt pouch at my waist. It was a red liquid filling a test tube about the size of my index finger—a Potion, the basic means of recovery in Arcadia.
I popped the wax seal with my thumb and chugged the liquid with enough force to practically shove the vial into my mouth. A refreshing mint aroma filled my senses, followed by an unnaturally tasteless liquid.
If that meant I was all healed up and ready to dance again, there'd be no problem. But the potions in this game aren't that reliable… In fact, they're so useless it barely matters if you have them or not.
It's a heal-over-time, not an instant recovery, so it's useless as an emergency escape. On top of that, its healing power drops significantly if you're not resting, a heartbreaking design choice that makes you want to complain, "Is this feature even necessary?" Add to that a full 100-second duration to get the full effect, a delay so slow it's yawn-inducing for an action game. To put its combat effectiveness simply, it only recovers ten percent of your total HP over one hundred seconds.
Even considering I'm using a basic Potion for rookies, it's honestly garbage. Naturally, stacking them is impossible, and there's an additional 100-second recast time after the effect ends. It's not just trash, it's dust.
They say even dust can pile up into a mountain, but when the mountain itself is trying to kill you before you have time to pile anything up, it's a drop in the ocean. It's literally just for peace of mind.
The fact that I was desperately chugging one in the middle of a zero-margin defensive maneuver meant one thing—yeah, I was literally seconds away from death's door.
A quick glance showed my HP bar in the corner of my vision had already dipped below thirty percent and into the red zone. A heal icon displayed below my status bar was diligently doing its job, but the relentless sandstorm was more than canceling out the recovery, dragging me inexorably toward death.
I longed for Sora's healing magic, but she was in a predicament just as bad, if not worse, than mine. Unlike me, whose HP was continuously ticking down, Sora's status bar was lurching up and down erratically.
The Serpent Suckers that started appearing after the second scale was broken increased in number dramatically after the fourth.
She was forced to constantly move while searching for the scales and fighting off a swarm that was consistently in the double digits. That's no easy task. What's more, Sora wasn't an agility-focused build like me; she was a balanced type. She couldn't outrun them and was forced to engage—with nothing but a single sword, without the benefit of any skills.
The constantly fluctuating status bar painted a vivid picture of the girl being swarmed. I knew I'd given her a tough role, but it's not like I could have her go one-on-one with this damn boss. It was unavoidable.
This was my first time fighting it instead of just running, and I didn't even have the leeway to glance over and check on my partner. This role was absolutely necessary, no matter how you sliced it. And then…
"…Sixth one!"
The great serpent, which had been playing tag with me, twitched its head and let out a roar of rage. There was no forced stun like the first time, but its fury was plain to see. This was the sixth time—the signal that Sora had destroyed the sixth scale.
I batted away the persistently attacking tail blade, dodging while checking my remaining HP.
…Is this going to be enough?
"Bring it on…!!"
I leaped into the air to evade the building-sized behemoth as it coiled up and charged. As it passed, it swung its tail up to smash my airborne body, but I dodged with a practiced aerial jump. For a moment, I could almost see a flicker of irritation on the inorganic reptilian face… actually, no, I have no idea. This thing doesn't even have eyes.
In any case, we'd finally made it this far.
The sixth scale. With only one of the seven remaining, this was the turning point in the [Great Serpent of Dust] strategy, and also the limit of what I could reach solo.
After all, if the goal was simply to run around and destroy all the scales, I could just outrun the serpent and do a marathon myself. With the twenty percent stat boost from Spectate Yell, it wouldn't even be impossible to do it while carrying Sora.
So why did I choose a strategy where I pinned this thing down and had Sora do the running? The answer is…
"—Hah, knew you'd do that!"
The great serpent, which had been diligently chasing me despite being concerned about its dwindling body parts, suddenly turned its massive body.
Its behavior routine was the same, even with a partner this time. This was the absolute worst, most infuriating element that had made my solo clear impossible.
Turning its head in what was presumably the direction of the final scale, the great serpent dove into the sand to burrow—like hell I'll let you!
"ORA!"
I smashed the massive head aside with a horizontal swing of my [Distorted Iron Lump Hammer] just as it tried to dive into the sand. The damage was still negligible, but as long as I could interrupt it, that was enough.
The moment the sixth scale is destroyed, it tries to perform a certain scripted action. That action is burrowing into the sand to instantly teleport to the final scale.
It's relatively easy to interrupt by just wailing on it, but it completely ignores defense, evasion, and counterattacks, single-mindedly trying to reach the final scale. The moment that action is completed, our defeat is all but guaranteed.
This absolute bastard teleports ahead of you so you can't possibly catch up, then coils around the scale to protect it. To top it off, it unleashes its damaging sand field at full power, but not only does the slip damage skyrocket, the effective range covers the entire battlefield. It's basically a death sentence.
This super-unreasonable sandstorm seems to be a desperate move for the serpent, as its own HP also decreases as if it's sacrificing its life force. But it's painfully obvious which will run out first: the boss's massive HP pool or the already-depleted player's.
No matter what, we'd die first. And trying to interrupt it becomes impossible because getting close accelerates the damage to near-instant-death levels. In other words, letting it reach that last scale means a guaranteed gimmick failure.
This is where I got stuck. There was no way to beat teleportation no matter how fast I ran, and while I could interrupt its burrowing, I couldn't do that and head for the scale at the same time.
So, I even got clever and tried to map out all the scale locations on a marathon run, planning to snipe the last one with a thrown weapon… but after running around the battlefield for over two hours, I only ever found six. The moment the thought crossed my mind that the seventh one might only appear after breaking the sixth, my spirit broke.
"Well, I guess I could have just carried her part of the way… but still!"
I'm not above using any means necessary to win, but this was finally Sora's chance to shine. If we failed, we could just try again. So I wanted her to do it with her own power from start to finish.
No longer paying me any mind, the great serpent repeatedly tried to burrow toward the seventh scale. I just kept hitting its head like it was a home run derby. With no need to worry about counterattacks, I had a little more breathing room and scanned the area.
I couldn't see the seventh scale, nor could I see Sora running around looking for it. But her status bar, still fluctuating wildly, was a clear testament to her struggle.
"—Hah, huff…!"
Sora drove the tip of her sword into a creature biting her leg, then narrowly dodged the next one that leaped at her from the side. "Not yet, not yet," she thought, her heart racing as she glanced at the ring on her right hand. The moment it lit up, Sora, who had stopped to fight defensively, broke into a run.
"[Heal Light]—!"
She cast the location-based healing spell in her path, then ran straight through the veil of green light that appeared. Unlike the Potions that Haru called "useless," Sora's magic was an instant-recovery type. However, it was still a low-level spell that any rookie could learn, and while its healing power was practical, it came with various restrictions.
The biggest problem was its long cast time. The charge time to cast the spell was about eight seconds. That number, not even reaching ten, felt terrifyingly long in the midst of a battle filled with split-second decisions.
She hadn't noticed it when she was just watching from the back, but now that she was on the front lines, Sora was shocked by the overwhelming difference in her perception of time.
Eight seconds, which should have been over in a flash, felt agonizingly distant. Furthermore, if the caster's concentration was broken during the cast time, the spell would, of course, fail.
She wasn't particularly bad at it, but she couldn't move around too much while maintaining the mental focus for the spell. Stopping to fight back was the most she could manage.
"If I'd known this would happen…!"
I should have put more status points into AGI. Regret for what could have been filled her as her slightly-too-slow speed failed to shake the pursuing Suckers.
Run while taking hits, stop to activate healing magic and endure, then run again. It was an endless cycle, and as Sora raced across the desert, her body and spirit were in tatters.
To put it mildly, she was a wreck… but a sense of exhilaration and fulfillment she had never known in her previous adventures as a support character washed over her. A smile bloomed on the sand-caked girl's face.
"I can't exactly judge Haru-san for his antics now… heh!"
She let out a wry smile, aware of the grin on her own cheeks as she stabbed her sword into the bubbling sand at her feet.
He had calmed down a lot recently, but her partner's frenzied behavior from when they first met flashed in her mind. While she wasn't going that far, she couldn't help but feel a little exasperated at herself for smiling in the midst of such a disastrous situation.
Now that she kind of understood the feeling, maybe she should cut him some slack for his maniacal laughter. As she mentally revised her standards for being "weirded out" by Haru, her eyes—caked with sand and surrounded by man-eating fish—caught sight of it.
"—Hah, the seventh one!!"
A great scale, shining brightly and wreathed in a dust cloud far thicker than the others. Haru had been fuming that he could never find it… but seeing the crater-like depression around it, it had probably been buried in the sand until the sixth one was destroyed.
"Hah, this is…"
Seeing the area around the scale, Sora instinctively stopped.
The depression surrounding the scale—a perfect circle of constantly sliding sand, like an antlion's pit. It was like nature's maw, ready to trap any intruder.
Sora's gradually developing gamer sense was telling her something.
—Yeah, I'm probably not getting out of this.
The Sucker attacks hadn't stopped, and there was no guarantee they would once she jumped into this pit. What's more, if the attacks continued, Sora would end up at the bottom of the crater, completely surrounded by sand.
If that happened, she wouldn't just be attacked from her feet, but from all directions—
"—"
"Ah…"
She thought she heard a voice from far away. Was it the great serpent's roar, or the defiant cry of the small figure opposing it? The sound was so faint, lost in the dust, that she couldn't even tell whose it was. That tiny sound, quieter than the wind…
—It's a game, so let's have fun.
It was something Haru always said to encourage her whenever she was overwhelmed by this incredible world.
For some reason, it came back to her then.
"Hah…!!"
Kicking aside the hesitation that had held her at the edge of the crater, Sora threw herself into the antlion pit.
Just as she'd thought, the flowing sand acted like a slide, pulling her body downward. It might be a different story for Haru, who had mastered the otherworldly technique of aerial jumping, but Sora probably couldn't climb back up.
While jumping into what was effectively a deathtrap—a smile played on Sora's lips.
"Because it's a game—"
She somehow controlled her body as it was carried by the current of sand and raised her sword high. The familiar sight of bubbling sand surrounded her as she slid—but she didn't care anymore.
Either way, the status bar in the corner of her vision told her she was out of time. There was no choice but to dive in.
Yes, if she was going to do it, she would have an adventure she could never have in her real life.
"You have to have fun—right?!"
Channeling all the momentum from her slide, she brought the sword down in a powerful overhead strike on the final scale.
The straight sword that had shattered six scales before shattered the great scale in the same way—unleashing an explosive blast of light and sound unlike any before, swallowing Sora along with the sand.