This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/hfy by /u/MrIzuarel on 2024-10-29 15:41:31+00:00.
Chapter 98
I was pleasantly surprised to easily find the boss of the area. Right after finding him, I noticed a lot of things, but two of them stood out.
First, the wolf boss was way smaller than the spider, even though he had a higher level. And second, he had far fewer health points.
These two facts about this boss told me everything I needed to know about monsters that managed to swallow divine crystals.
I came closer and had a better look at him.
An "blade wolf," which was not that bad looking. Unlike the small fries here, he actually looked like a dark grey-blue wolf. The only parts that deviated were a few small silver blades at his joints and two bigger ones at his shoulders. He was also carrying one of the larger ones in his mouth. That blade had most likely fallen off him at some point, and now he was carrying it like a stick.
I had found him when he was out hunting and didn't know why he used the third blade until I saw him decapitate a bear in one swing. He then proceeded to eat as much of the corpse as he could until it started dissolving into black smoke. He then inhaled that smoke and marched on.
Point taken.
I silently followed him to his hideout.
If someone asks why I hadn't been attacked by the boss, I was flying high in the sky, far away from his reach.
Once he arrived at a large cave, I saw many of those blades he grew on his shoulders laying around. Those were clearly bodyparts he had lost, similar to how deers lost their antlers. But why didn't they just disappear?
While I was left wondering what the differences between him and me were, I observed the boss more.
The crystal icon showed me what I needed to know.
○○○○○
Whirlwind
90% chance to avoid attacks
○○○○○
Great. He didn't have that many health points compared to the spider, but with that buff, he was just as annoying to kill as the big one. I followed him for a few days and was certain of two things.
First, I didn't want to fight him near his hideout. The blade he was carrying around behaved strangely, and I clearly didn't want to fight him where he had dozens of them laying around. The other point was that he had no other special attack other than the blade.
For a short amount of time I was uncertain if I should take that monster with me to my dungeon and trap him inside like I did with the chicken, but that experience was something I didn't want to live through again.
After some thoughts, I decided to make it very easy on me. Unlike the spider, he only had one blade he could use to attack from a distance. If I could separate it from him, then we could let acid rain down on him without fearing him.
This was a good idea, but it could be improved even further.
Traps! Those small devices created through the engeneer job were quite useful in such cases. In the case of the spider, they were nearly useless, but the wolf here actively left his home to hunt. That meant I could lure him into a hellhole made of hundreds of deadly traps.
I enjoyed that idea.
To be precise, I had already found out about the differences between the traps inside the game and the real world.
I had access to two types of traps. Traps for dungeons, which were elaborate and very dangerous, didn't affect the creator and his allies.
And traps for outside. These traps were weaker and cost fewer resources. In both cases, their numbers were limited in the game, but not here...
The traps for the dungeon still had their hard limit, but for some strange reason, the regular traps had lost their limitations.
When I finished the first floor of my dungeon, I decided to plaster the place with as many traps as I could. I had, except for the spots where my farms would be, put on every centimeter half a dozen traps. Anyone breaking in my dungeon with a trap dismantling skill would leave after seeing what waited for them a few steps ahead.
And now I had the opportunity to create a death floor here and lure in the boss. Even if the traps were inferior and only 10% of them would have an effect on the boss, if I created enough of them, then the fight would go in my favor.
There was only one problem with this. I had to keep the other monsters away from my killing floor, or else they would accidentally trigger them. I looked at my traps. I had only access to two types. Explosives and slow. Both types of traps required some wood and metall. Explosives needed additionally some stones to create black powder and slow needed alchemical ingredients for glue.
I almost wished I could use the other traps like bleeding, poison, confusion, or blinding traps that the engineer specialists could do, but I was already happy with these two.
I looked at the components of the traps and made a very large list of everything we needed, then started to collect everything.
I was not idiotic enough to immediately deploy the traps or else I would need my girls to protect them, but seeing how the items piled up in front of me made me realize that I needed to start working on the second floor of my dungeon. ASAP.
I had the idea of creating an underground maze for the next floor, then slowly transforming that maze into an alien/ant colony as the players progressed. It would not only be a maze on the horizontal plane but also in the vertical plane as the intruders would have to move up floors to continue their invasion instead of a constant descent of floors.
In my mind, there was nothing more frustrating than to try and understand a three-dimensional object when you only had two-dimensional representations.
Since I had nothing better to do than also hunt inside dungeons, I joined my girls in their regular runs.
Forget about being aggressive. My girls took the "no chill" attitude to the next level and decimated everything after preparing their ambush with my hunter traps. That too could be an interesting way to lure the boss into the killing floor...
After learning from the experts in ambush, I returned to my regular duties. Since my girls were now regularly fishing, I didn't need to force myself to do it, so I focused my attention on obtaining buffs again.
I was surprised by how slow I was collecting the buffs compared to how fast the numbers of my girls grew. If that went on like that, only the smallest portion of them would end with that buff...