This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/hfy by /u/MrIzuarel on 2024-10-28 13:38:44+00:00.
Chapter 94
We had safely retreated from that location, and I was digesting the information.
One of the powers that stupid spider had was "spawning," which caused her to lay thousands of eggs in one go. I had seen it myself and wasn't very keen on finding out how exactly that worked.
The other was a far more annoying power. "Heals 10% of health every 5 seconds."
If the situation had been inside the game, then I would know exactly how to deal with it as two of the bosses in the game had similar abilities. But this was not the game, but reality.
In the game, initially, the players didn't understand how to win against such a boss. They tried to overpower it, only to fail as only a small percentage could do it, and those players only made it because they used all of their last resort skills.
The real strategy was actually counter-intuitive as it required two steps to win against the boss. One, use the time frame to deal damage to the boss, and two, to heal the boss directly. To make things worse, aoe heals and multi-target heals wouldn't work, so it had to be a targeted heal of the boss, something most healers would never do.
In the game, the excessive healing of the boss monster would put a debuff called "scarred flesh", which would make it impossible for the boss to heal to 100%, as the scarred flesh would slowly block parts of the health points.
This would, of course, make it slowly easier to kill the boss as the more the healer weakened the boss, the less damage the fighters had to do. The boss would still heal the same amount of health points as before, but the real health points slowly descended to an achievable level.
That did not just make it easier on the players, but it was enjoyable because it was a different type of fight.
At first, the players hated them, and many simply gave up on those bosses, but that changed rapidly. When someone who most definitely wasn't a developer leaked the method to kill those bosses online, they instantly became player favorites. There were some complaints, but only because they ranted about previous failed tries and the deception of the developers. It was a great time back then.
But here, in this world, it was different. Here, in the real world, there was no guarantee of such a thing occurring. I would greatly welcome such a thing, but there was an incredibly difficult, if not impossible, flaw to overcome with this problem.
We had no healers.
Please don't misunderstand, we had healing consumables that our sentinels ate inside the dungeon, but dedicated healers was something I never even considered creating as summons, and unless I got some after a few evolutions, this boss was basically untouchable.
Putting that boss on ice for the moment was the correct answer to such problems. If I could not recreate the scarring flesh effect on that beast, then I had no other choice than to punch that thing to death.
And there was the next problem. I saw my damage numbers, multiplied by the number of warriors, added around half for each individual of the other classes, and compared them to the healing of that spider...
Even with one hundred times the numbers we had now, we were hopelessly outmatched.
There was only one way to do this, and it would be a disaster. I was terrified about this plan. Of all the possibilities I had, only one skill I had could become strong enough to overcome that beast.
The acid balls.
The accumulative damage should technically be able to overpower that healing, but even with our numbers, that plan would take hours, if not days, to pull off. And I doubted the boss would simply take it and not counterattack.
That would also mean that most of my girls would die in battle and most likely multiple times at that.
I had no other choice than to put that monster on hold for the moment, but it also meant that I would need more summons and more skills.
To get more skills...
What was this for a situation? I felt like I was on a sinking ship, and the more holes I managed to clog up, the more of them reappeared. I was on a Frankenstein ship with more stitches and nails than planks and sails. I was almost ready to give up on this.
Seriously, what was the purpose of this? I was already strong enough not to be preasured by the humans of this world. Why try harder?
And then I looked at my girls. Because, just maybe, there was more to this place than just me alone in a small cage that I would call my private dungeon and more to them than I ever imagined. They should enjoy their time as much as they want. And if it meant that I would have to put my hands on the matter, then so be it!
While thinking about this, I looked at the map and tried to find out what to do. The spider was put on hold for the moment. Strengthening was a constant task that we all worked on, so there was no need to change that. What else could I do then?
There were no black dots in the vicinity, nor were there colored ones except the vicious green one. I had the choice of leaving this place for some far away reward, or stay and get stronger here.
While pondering about a solution, I got an idea. I could not kill the big spider, but I could cause problems to them in other ways. I would harm them by reducing their numbers.
The plan was quite easy. First, I would reduce my level to their tier, then use the hunter traps to lure out as many spiders as I could while staying far away from that titan to not affect him.
The first time I did that, I noticed that the levels of the spiders didn't decrease like other monsters. This was most likely because they were spawned by the boss itself. But I didn't give up.
We continuously lured them out and killed them like every other monster. I was surprised because at some point, the discomfort and fear the girls had towards the spiders diminished and then disappeared. But that wasn't the only change I noticed during this intensive hunting period.
While continuously luring the spiders out, the bigger ones became less frequent, followed by them replenishing their dwindling numbers again, but with a degraded level.
That happened only after about twenty traps, so it wasn't immediate, but it was a sign that my attempts were having an effect on the monsters here. Even if, in the worst case, it was only temporary, I was causing a change the area.
And while we were hunting as many spiders as we could, we also hunted as many monsters as possible inside the dungeons. My weakest summons could not endure such continuous fights and died often, so their buffs needed to be reapplied, which meant I had to hunt and kill as many monsters as possible in between trap activities.