Horsing Around

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The Class Pack disabled Low Alchemy and Biomancy as well as all of their branches. It also delivered a whopping -10 to his Int and removed his mana regeneration completely.

In return, he got a stance that reserved 35% of his mana pool and gave him a 15% buff to his physical stats and melee damage, 20% buff to knockback, stagger, and knockdown from melee attacks and 30% physical damage resistance. It was, frankly, a ludicrous buff that would let him flatly overpower any melee fighter of his Level without something like it. Being a Boss probably qualified as ‘something like it’ with power budget to spare though.

In the less absurd but still potent category, he got a passive that recovered his mana when he took damage or inflicted knockback, stagger, and knockdown in melee, Techniques to do just that or spike his already impressive defenses, and a 10% mana reserve skill to designate an ally as his Ward. All of those were contingent on being in the stance.

The Ward designation gave him a constant, intuitive, and precise understanding of their location, status, and activities. Testing it on Qhila before engaging revealed that the information on location and status were equal to what his Party system put in his UI, but without having to spend a fraction of a second checking the UI to update the information. On activities, he knew exactly what she was currently doing, what she was going to do the moment she decided to do it, and even the expected trajectory of her crossbow darts whenever she aimed it anywhere.

In the more mechanical end, he got a modest mana discount on tanking Techniques when standing between Qhila and an enemy, and she got a short window of increased armor and resistance penetration against an enemy whenever he successfully applied a crowd control Techniques to it.

Class Pack given a once-over and a basic order of battle decided, they joined the fray, relieving Hubert from the stalemate of dodge rolls and hasty, missed arrows. Qhila fanned out to the side, loading her crossbow, while John went directly for the roostaur, quickly getting its attention.

The mutant wasted no time charging him, head lowered to impale him on its beak. At the last moment, he sidestepped and kicked low with a Sweeping Log Technique. Trying to sweep the roostaur’s legs out from under it felt like kicking a tree, but while it didn’t fall, it did both stumble and take a bit of damage. John did neither, so he’d chalk that one up as a small win.

While the stumble wasn’t enough to trigger a window of vulnerability for Qhila, it was enough for both her and Hubert to hit it before it picked up speed again. The roostaur wheeled around for another charge in what seemed so far to be fairly straightforward Boss mechanics.

Hoping to repeat the moderate success, John did another Sweeping Log. As he did, the mutant reared up into a leap, swiping at him with the spurs as it did. His only way to dodge it was to drop to the ground, following the momentum of the sweep into a backward roll.

He still got jostled by the rear talons as it passed, taking a few points of damage, but it almost certainly beat getting spurred. The real downside of the move showed when he rolled back up into a kneel to assess the situation.

The roostaur was now charging straight at Qhila. Apparently, going prone had dropped aggro, though he wasn’t sure that’d work reliably. Or cause it to abort a charge in progress even if it was otherwise reliable. Time to break out the expensive Technique.

The Boar Rush took out half of his unreserved mana, but let him actually run down the charging Boss and shoulder tackle it. The **** of his Technique-enhanced momentum broke the roostaur’s stride, and with it the charge. Instead, the mutant wheeled around and reared up, striking at him with the spurs again.

He was somewhat prepared for that, getting a block up in time to ward off the attack from his face and torso. Instead, some nasty scratches further frayed the already tattered sleeves of his biking jacket and gave it a fresh coat of bloodstains. Thankfully, the actual damage was manageable, in no small part thanks to the stance buff.

On the up side, he successfully got the heat off Qhila. Even better, the knockback from the tackle was enough to trigger the moment of vulnerability and the kobold had readjusted to the situation fast enough to take advantage.

The roostaur disengaged the melee a moment later, narrowly dodging a second arrow from Hubert in the process, and wheeled around for another charge at John. Unsure whether it was going to go for another round of spurs or back to pecking, the Gamer decided not to get fancy and just aim for a cleanly timed dodge.

A half-second before John thought it was time to sidestep, the mutant forcefully extended its neck, thrusting its beak at him like a lance. With no chance to make a controlled dodge, John’s only chance at evasion was to throw himself to the ground, and Qhila and Hubert under the bus. This time, however, he remembered that he had a defensive Iron Skin Technique.

It was the cheapest one, giving him a pile of innate Armor Rating for 1 second. Even with that, he took 25 points of damage and almost got knocked on his ass. At least the damage taken just barely gave him more mana back than he had spent.

Unfortunately, it hadn’t even been enough of a body block to give the others good windows to shoot, with both arrow and injection dart not quite making the mark as the roostaur sped away to line up another charge.

Since holding back defensively hadn’t worked out, and repeating the Sweeping Log hadn’t either, John decided to go on the offensive with another Technique instead, even though his mana pool was beginning to slim down.

The Bell Ringer actually reduced the damage of his strike a bit and completely negated critical hits, but if he hit the target’s head, it got a massive increase to stagger and a chance to outright stun the target for a moment.

Because of the roostaur’s height, going at it with a straight punch was pretty much asking to get impaled in the process. That left a downward dodge into uppercut or jumping slightly to the side and coming down from above. Considering that the one time it had dodged, it had done so upwards, John went for the latter.

The Technique gave him an intuitive idea how much **** to put into the jump, and the beast pulled no last minute surprises. Even better, he did get in the stun as well, and with a crowd control double whammy, he recovered the full cost of the spell.

Like after the Boar Rush, the roostaur reared up and tried to bring its spurs to bear on him for a moment before going back to charging. He had had longer to get himself positioned to receive it, though, so he managed an almost clean dodge, coming away with only a single point of damage taken.

Over the next handful of passes, John sunk the rest of his unreserved mana into Technique and got the pattern down. It turned out the roostaur had a tell in how it held its head when it charged. It was fairly subtle, but still well recognizable once John figured out what to look for.

If it held its head upwards and beak straight ahead, it was going to do the jumping spur strike. The best John could do there was pretty much just to steer clear, or maybe consider taking a light hit to recover mana. Head held low and beak pointing straight ahead meant it was just charging and using its beak as a lance. The counter move there was a well timed Bell Ringer.

Head held high and beak at a downwards angle meant it was going to peck. The best move there was to time his sidestep and then hit it with a Shoulder Ram while it passed. The Shoulder Ram was more or less Boar Rush’s little brother, forgoing the superhuman dash and some **** in return for a much lower mana cost.

All of that hinged on him having mana to spend, however, and that well had run dry with the Boss having a bit over 350 HP left. Which meant either taking a big hit to recoup mana or coming up with a different strategy.

After two charge passes of not quite working himself up to take a direct hit on purpose, he had a different idea. “Qhila! Line up shots directly through me when it charges.”

“What?!?”

“Trust me. It’s Gamer Bullshit time.” He flashed a grin at her over his shoulder, turning back just in time to get out of the way of another peck.

“Bloody- Okay, 2 seconds.”

They took another pass to line up properly, then it was time to see if John’s idea worked. Thanks to the Ward bond, he could feel exactly where Qhila was aiming, including the hesitation to aim through him.

As soon as the roostaur was committed to its charge, John flashed her a thumbs up gesture. Reassured that he had a plan, she fired the dart. The moment the Gamer sensed his companion putting pressure on the trigger, he went into a half-crouch. The envenomed projectile sailed over his shoulder and buried itself in the mutant’s, adding to the growing list of poison debuffs.

The half-crouch also put John in a good position to do a dodge-leap to the side, narrowly avoiding the beast’s beak. They repeated the success for several more passes, with John taking a glancing hit from the roostaur every now and then. Unfortunately, they couldn’t use the trick with Hubert’s arrows as well, so while the debuff stacking was progressing nicely, their DPS had hit rock bottom in the meanwhile.

In theory, the kill was in the bag already. Several of Qhila’s venoms had durations of several hours, ticking along a low DPS debuff all the while. An indicator for the combined pending DoT damage showed that it had exceeded the Boss’ remaining HP a while ago.

That didn’t do them much good though, as John would definitely get exhausted long before, and if they retreated, it would probably have a non-combat heal mechanic to prevent them from doing hit and run cheese tactics. In fact, he was beginning to feel the burn of fatigue already, so they needed to kick the DPS back in gear soon or they were screwed.

Time to either purposefully take that serious hit for mana or… do a gamble where the fail state was taking such a hit. Class Pack or not, John still wasn’t keen on the tank lifestyle, so picking the “maybe not get hit” option was a no brainer.

The next time the roostaur attempted a charging peck, John followed the dodge up with a full body tackle, mimicking his previous Shoulder Ram timing. Lacking the added **** of the Technique, John compensated by throwing his entire weight and Enhance Muscle’d leg strength behind it, with no mind kept to not going down himself.

They ended up piled up on the ground, the roostaur cawing angrily, flailing its limbs and twisting and turning. Meanwhile, John just tried to get away before one of the- The wind was knocked out of him as a spur caught him straight in the gut, and a ripping motion saw it tear him open. He got a brief, nauseating glimpse of his own intestines spilling out before Gamer’s Body repaired the 86 damage hit.

Fighting through the pain and the queasiness, John managed to get some distance to the beast. It took another three shots, two arrows and a dart, while getting up and running to set up another charging lane.

Taking stock of the situation, John was back at full mana, but down to 1/3rd HP. The roostaur was just shy of 300 HP. On the face of it, he should probably use a healing potion. But once he had gotten the timings and telegraphings down, keeping from suffering more than scratch damage had been fairly reliable, and he had mana for Iron Skin in a pinch. He decided that 20% HP remaining was potion time, and try to win while keeping them for later first.

That turned out to be the right choice. While the next section of the fight was easier for John to manage than before on account of the debuffs, the real tipping point came when it hit 112 HP left. Until that point, the fight had been John using smarts and pattern prediction to hang on against a physically superior opponent. Now, the roostaur’s motor control was impaired enough to give John the upper hand in AGI on top of fighting smarter. From then on, it was completely one sided.

As soon as the roostaur’s last HP vanished, a few things happened. John’s stance ended and the icons denoting Techniques and such in his UI did as well, with the usual Low Alchemy and Biomancy stuff instead no longer being grayed out. The intuitive sense of what Qhila was doing faded as well, though it was ever so slightly gradual instead of one moment to the next. Hubert’s model blinked, returning with an empty quiver, and delivered a line about having to head back. Finally, the UI tracker for the Mad Mutagenist’s Mansion Quest updated.

Bonus Objective I (Completed)
Kill the mutant maker’s greatest creation 1/1

“Well, looks like we’re off to a good start.”

She nodded, but in lieu of a verbal response to John, she looked at Hubert and said, “Sure”, causing the NPC to make good on his word and leave. That done, she turned to him. “I’ll take a look around the grounds while you heal up.”

She ended up finding recently disturbed soil behind a shed. Digging it up yielded a rusty strongbox containing a few cartoonish gold nuggets, a minor secret worth some money and 10 DP. She also found a thoroughly boarded up servants’ entrance. Meanwhile, John healed up and turned Pheromone Aura back on the inspiring and high settings once he no longer needed the full mana regeneration.