The first thing Ronan realised was that the boss monster was far tougher than any of the weak enemies he’d fought until that point. Most of the knives and mana bolts he launched at it barely left more than a scratch on its black scales, simply annoying it.
The tentacles were strong as hell, too. Each time he blocked a blow from one of them he was knocked backwards, forced to leap between the floating corpses so that he didn’t fall into the ocean. If not being in the water while fighting the other monsters had been a desire, it was a necessity against the Abyssal Orkrakstacean. A terrible name, too. Couldn’t it have just been called an abomination or something instead of just mashing a bunch of sea creature names together?
Ronan and the boss were in a stalemate. While he wasn’t doing much damage to it, it was also failing to harm him much. He was constantly on the move, though, which meant it had a slight advantage. To make matters worse, he had no idea if the tutorial would end with the defeat of the boss or not, which meant he was conflicted about whether he could let the ship take any damage or not.
On the one hand, all the tutorials until that point had ended with a boss battle. However, the harder difficulty tutorial had five stages, rather than four, and he was still in the fourth stage of the nightmare difficulty. Was there going to be a second boss battle, or did the massive spike in level mean a fifth stage wasn’t necessary for the nightmare tutorial?
As he finished that thought the boss finished gathering energy, a crackling mass of mana held in stasis between its four claws. With a roar it smashed the claws together, sending a laser of white-hot energy tearing towards him. Ronan rolled to the side and it only singed his shoulder, but the boss wasn’t done. It moved its claws and the beam moved with them, like some kind of magically guided persistent damage spell.
Unfortunately for the hideous creature Ronan wasn’t easily defeated. He used dispel and the mana vanished as if it had never existed. The lurching sensation that gripped his heart made him check his status and he was shocked to see that dispelling the boss’ spell had taken about fifteen percent of his maximum mana. Considering that he had over 100,000 points of the stuff, that was absurd. He couldn’t rely on attrition against his latest foe.
He immediately changed strategies. If holding out would only lead to him wasting mana and being on the defensive, then he had to attack. Ronan wasn’t afraid of doing so, no matter how ugly the abyssal monstrosity he battled was.
Rather than continue wasting time with mana bolts, he began to channel a rainbow bomb. Even though there was only one enemy, it was sturdy enough that the greater firepower of that spell was required. He also started closing the distance between them. It was tough to jump between the floating bodies while its tentacles constantly struck at him, but the blows were fairly telegraphed and not hard to parry.
He reached the main body of the monster and leapt directly at its jaws. He thrust his sword at its head while activating all of his attacking skills. However, it was ungodly fast and managed to bring all of its claws between Ronan’s blade and its face.
The first blow made the claws tremble but failed to knock its guard out of the way, the second caused a few cracks to form, and the third shattered one of the three claws. Ronan had plenty of stamina and mana to burn, so Surging Strikes was far from finished. Another eight blows struck, but even the critical hits only managed to shake its defence. Eventually he blasted through the claws, only to get smashed in the face with one of its gargantuan tentacles.
The sword in his hands dissipated as he flew through the air. He smashed into the ocean’s surface, feeling something in his chest break before he bounced right back into the air. That repeated a few times as he was turned into a skimming stone and eventually splashed into the sea.
When he swam back to the surface he took a deep breath. There were too many pains in his body to count. Even with his stats and resistances the boss had done a number on him. I need to not forget it has so many limbs the next time I attack. Unfortunately for Ronan he had no easy way to heal himself. Suture Wound stopped most of the external bleeding, but he still struggled to apply Minor Heal with his sorcery.
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He did alleviate some of the damage but there was little he could do for the broken bones. He had figured out that Suture Wound could sort of stitch the bones together, but it didn’t actually heal the breaks, only sort of smoosh the bones back together. I’ll just have to kill the big fucker and get restored.
There were no bodies nearby so he had to swim back towards the ship. Thanks to his high stats he cut through the water like a fish on steroids, but even so it wasn’t a pleasant experience. When he stared at the boss he was forced to reevaluate the threat it posed. The four claws he had destroyed had regrown and they were bigger than before. Is this overpowered fucker just going to get stronger every time I wound it? I guess I need to kill it fast, but how will I do that if it can eat nine Surging Strikes in a row?
Despite being at a disadvantage for the first time in a while he wasn’t scared. He had hoped to beat the nightmare difficulty tutorial for the first time, but even if he died his multipliers would increase and he would simply come back stronger for the next attempt.
His strongest magical and physical attacks had failed to do more than wound the boss. Which meant he needed to go bigger. The whole point of taking sorcerer in the first place was so that he didn’t need to be constrained by the system’s limits. Why had he simply copied the skills it originally gave him? At first it was because he lacked the knowledge and ability to do more than what he’d been shown, but that was no longer the case.
Ever since he received the mana affinity and evolved his sorcerer class, Ronan had felt a deeper connection to his mana and his spells. More than that, the practice he had put in let him understand how spellcasting worked on a more fundamental level. He wouldn’t claim to be an expert or to suddenly be able to unleash the kind of cataclysmic damage that someone like his ancestor was capable of, but he knew he could do better than a measly mana bolt or even a rainbow bomb.
The boss hadn’t quite noticed that he was out of the sea yet, but there was no telling how sensitive it was. He had to work fast. Ronan reached into his heart and began to cycle his mana. He only had about half of his maximum left, but it was regenerating even as he watched. Once he had most of it cycling through his body, almost completely under his control, he began to experiment. Using the structure of the mana bolt and rainbow bomb as a basis, he started to create his new spell.
From what he understood, there were different parts of the spell that did different things. The outer structure was essentially a container for the spell that ensured it didn’t simply unravel into ambient mana the moment it left his body. That had happened many times during his earliest sorcery experiments, but it wasn’t until recently that he figured out why that was the case. Against the boss he didn’t need to spread the damage over a wide area, but have it deal as much as possible in a smaller area. In a way it reminded him of his very early tests where he tried to figure out the best way to cast a mana bolt. For this, something like a double-firing mechanism could work. Whether he could actually ‘build’ that into the spell remained to be seen.
He felt a huge buildup of mana in the distance. The boss didn’t seem to be looking in his direction but was preparing another spell anyway. It’s probably going to blast the ship. Just my luck. Ronan cursed inwardly but continued his work. There was nothing else he could do except figure out how to kill the boss before it turned him to paste.
When he managed to set up the first part of the spell, which was a delayed explosion that released all of its energy in a narrow cone, he pumped a fist. That caused the spell to unravel but he wasn’t worried. He had figured it out which meant he could replicate it. Unfortunately it was impossible to pack enough power into the spell that it would pierce through the boss’ tough shell and make it fast enough to avoid being smacked out of the air by one of its tentacles before the spell could reach its target. There was a solution to his problem, but he wasn’t sure he would find it in time.
At that moment he heard the boss roar before unleashing another devastating beam of white-hot energy at the ship. He lost some of his mana as his spell was forcibly cancelled.
