I had reached level 156. The rest of the raid were all over 80. For the first time since Youlang activated the pentagram, I felt hope that we had a chance to survive the day. Our key to that was now emitting his ‘groghkhr’ noises unceasingly. Despot groaned and strained, but stayed whole — the demons couldn’t deal damage to him, and his bony spines and halberd arms stuck into the stone helped him stay in place. We just needed the tunnel itself to withstand the onslaught of the monsters.
The loot from Tital was an epic boomerang which nobody wanted except the hobbit chef Nobu.
“Better than my slingshot,” he said, inspecting the weapon. “Those stones weren’t even doing any damage…”
The next big target was the boss of floor 289, an ordinary two-headed demon called Seimur. The creature cast Dance of Death, spinning around and striking simultaneously with lashes, hooves and tail. He presented no problems.
The thing that was supposed to kill us and make Youlang a champion as she hid somewhere up in the chasm had become a gift of fate. The most powerful bosses apparently couldn’t fit through the dungeon gates. Huge mobs also couldn’t get through the narrow corridors of floor 21. After all, the upper levels had weaker bosses and smaller mobs. The space in the instances matched the mobs’ size.
After Seimur the demon was down, I met the three Companions, the already familiar bosses from floor 50. A few days prior, those three goat-faced bosses had nearly killed me, and then helped me take out a group of mages.
“Y-o-o-o-u-u-u! M-o-o-o-r-r-r-t-a-al! M-i-i-i-i-ne!” came their hissing from behind Despot.
“O-u-u-u-ur-rs!”
“Foo-oo-ood!” they cried over and over, trying to pull me through with their harpoons.
They were unsuccessful, of course. I was over four times their level and took them down easily, one Hammerfist for each.
I’d been constantly tense so far, but now I started to realize that the demons’ bite wasn’t as bad as their bark, and I relaxed. That was a mistake. The nightmare came from the apparently weak bosses of floor 60. The Atlings, the two-foot-long worm-like leeches that had helped me knock the Readers out of the Games on two day, easily slid through the gaps between Despot and the walls.
There were precisely as many Atlings as there were members of our raid, and I couldn’t hold their aggro — each slimy leech chose a target and tried to stick to it. The instance filled with wild screams — Destiny shrieked as she trampled one of the disgusting creatures. Nobu’s epic boomerang flew this way and that with a whistle above the battlefield. Quetzal wiped one of them across the floor, but two appeared in place of the one, and while Quetzal killed the first, the second stuck to him. The titan’s health bar began to drop. Each slime we took down split into two smaller ones, which caused even more problems.
Clarity was essential. I sped myself up and rushed to help my allies. Everything slowed for me, and I had time to assess the situation. Kara, covered in the creatures, tried to cast a spell, but couldn’t: the slimes must have been interrupting it. I flew to Alison, who was desperately trying to heal both herself and the others, pulled back my arm to strike, but lowered it again. The Talon would pierce through not only the leech, but the girl’s skull too.
I had to work by hand: I started pulling the creatures off one by one, and only then killed them. Then I saw how fast they split into two. Now there were even more Atlings! Good thing their health dropped proportionally…
A few minutes later, the floor was teeming with rapidly darting leeches jumping at us. Once they stuck to a body, they immediately began sucking up blood. My spirit was going down too, and I hadn’t even killed a single one to the very end. We were all covered in low-level slimes, which didn’t seem to care that I was almost double their level! The creatures sucked out health in percentage values, which meant even I was in danger, especially since I still had to be the first obstacle in the path of the other demons who broke through.
“Kara!” I shouted, pushing a pig-like monster back from the raid. “Hit the bastards!”
“I can’t!” Kara shouted. “The damn toxin! The DOT breaks the cast!”
While Michelle and Alison healed the raid with instantaneous, but weak casts, Quetzal used area abilities to crush the leeches on the floor. Koba, Yen, Hellfish and Destiny loosed volleys of arrows. Joker’s bombs were the biggest help of all. Shame they blew up friend and foe alike.
Fortunately, after their sixth split, the Atlings finally died. In the end, we lost four: Niceguy, Hellfish, Bloomer and Meister. The poet nearly cut his own leg off while slicing through the worms. But we did it. I had placed Spirit Shackles to revive the dead in place, which saved them from getting zeroed by Abaddon at the bottom of the Pitfall.
Right after the battle, Hellfish accused Nobu of not helping him pull off the Atlings stuck to his back, although he was the nearest. The werewolf lost a level from that, but he could have been knocked out of the Games entirely!
“What could I do, with my boomerang?” the crafter asked, shrugging. “It got stuck into the floor and I had to pull it back out…”
“You could have stamped on them,” Anna said dryly. “Or used another weapon!”
“He knows that, he was just looking
