Chapter 99 - Another Boss Fight! (Patreon)

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Crystalwing Monarch (Level 69 | Tier 2)

[Roaming Boss]

Species: Crystal Beast

Aspect: Radiance

A colossal crystal moth that drifts through the Depths on luminous wings. Its living crystal body stores and amplifies immense quantities of light, bathing the surrounding cavern in a shifting radiance. Crystal beasts are often drawn to its presence.

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Crystalwing (Level 69 | Tier 2)

Species: Crystal Beast

Aspect: Light

A large moth composed of living crystal. Feeds upon ambient light and crystal growths, scattering brilliant flashes when threatened. Commonly found throughout the Crystal Depths in large swarms.

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...Well.

There is the roaming boss.

An absolute abomination drifts above what remains of the crystalline canopy, its wingspan stretching well over forty meters from tip to tip. Every beat of its wings scatters radiant light across the cavern, illuminating entire sections of forest in shifting waves of color.

Below it, chaos reigns.

Almost every tree in the area has been shredded with ruthless efficiency, the far denser trunks and thicker lower branches being the only things not shattered or actively flying through the air.

Crystal projectiles streak through the air.

Impact shockwaves ripple through the forest.

One particularly ambitious Crystal Stalker launches itself from a tall tree in what I can only describe as a spectacular lapse in judgment.

The swarm catches it immediately.

Hundreds of lesser moths converge upon the unfortunate predator and unleash enough Light-aspected magic to briefly turn it into the brightest object in the cavern.

A second later, it explodes into glittering debris.

I stare.

The moth stares.

My soul immediately attempts an emergency evacuation.

"...Can we skip this one?"

The party nods.

Immediately.

Without discussion.

An encouraging display of intelligence.

Decision made, we begin turning around with an entirely reasonable amount of haste.

After all, Marek had wanted to avoid the roaming boss from the beginning. Finding it this early is actually valuable information. There is absolutely no reason whatsoever to engage a gigantic flying insect commanding an army of slightly smaller flying insects.

None.

Unfortunately, experience has taught me that the universe rarely rewards sensible decisions.

In fact, according to the law of narrative tropes, successfully avoiding a problem dramatically increases the likelihood of immediately encountering a different problem.

My gravity sense pings.

Movement.

I look to the side.

A Prism Squirrel sits on a nearby branch.

The squirrel looks at me.

I look at the squirrel.

The squirrel opens its mouth.

…

I sigh.

The screech echoes through the forest.

Marek's Bulwark activates instantly, intercepting the incoming shockwave before it reaches the party.

A gunshot follows.

The squirrel acquires a dramatically simplified design philosophy.

Unfortunately, the damage has already been done.

I slowly raise my gaze toward the distant battle.

An army of moths is staring directly at us. The Crystalwing Monarch is also staring directly at us. And, as if the situation wasn't already deteriorating quickly enough, the monsters the moths had been fighting have likewise stopped fighting and begun staring at us as well.

The entire battlefield has gone still.

It is a surprisingly unsettling sight.

We are over a kilometer away, hidden beneath the non-shredded branches of the forest. Surrounded by crystal formations.

Yet every single monster is looking directly at us as though we are standing in the middle of an open field waving flags.

…

Perception.

Right.

That would do it.

I hate this dungeon.

Marek and Sylrae sigh loudly.

Rin chuckles.

Zeke hoists his staff with the expression of a man who has just realized the universe intends to make his day significantly worse, while Avelyn preemptively activates Hallowed Ground.

...I suppose we are fighting, then.

I briefly consider using my teleportation talisman and forcibly dragging everyone back to the beginner village.

The thought is deeply appealing.

Unfortunately, nobody else seems interested in this objectively correct course of action.

Astra Nocturne settles into my grip.

I look at the approaching army of moths.

My tail has somehow doubled in volume.

This is obviously a combat adaptation.

The bombardment begins immediately.

Light magic rains down from above as hundreds of oversized threats to my mental well-being decide that saturation artillery is the appropriate opening move.

Pale blue energy flares across Marek's Bulwark. Lances shatter against it. Beams disperse harmlessly into sparks. The shield wall holds.

Judging by the immediate grimace on Marek's face, however, holding it is expensive.

Considering how many swarm encounters this dungeon has thrown at us, I am beginning to suspect that every tank class in existence receives some variation of Bulwark.

Otherwise entire adventuring parties would simply cease to exist the moment a sufficient quantity of projectiles occupies the same postal code.

Bullet hell appears to be the unfortunate meta of Asteria.

Tragic.

Fortunately, I possess a solution.

Unstructured Astral Energy gathers at my feet, and crystal gives way to dark, fertile soil as a fragment of my Garden is imposed onto this layer of reality.

…

Reality. Layer.

Whatever.

The description feels correct, even if I have absolutely no idea why.

The circle expands rapidly. Vines burst from the earth, twisting skyward as I continue feeding power into the Arcana.

Ten.

Twenty.

Twenty-five.

I stop there.

Not because I couldn't create more.

I could likely field sixty or more if I was interested in converting my entire stamina pool into aggressive environmental restructuring.

The problem is that properly controlling twenty-five vines is already irritating.

My genius, regrettably, has limits.

The vines lash outward the moment they finish forming, intercepting incoming attacks and swatting lesser spells from the air. Beams shatter. Lances explode. Flashes of light vanish beneath a storm of kaleidoscopic impacts.

The larger attacks are a lost cause.

Those belong to Marek.

My condolences.

I survey the battlefield.

The Prism Squirrels have disappeared entirely, which somehow concerns me more than if they were actively attacking us.

Crystal Stalkers are advancing under illusion.

Several Chime Serpents have positioned themselves nearby, watching the chaos with the patience of professional opportunists.

And the moths…

The moths remain the primary problem.

They fly. They have ranged attacks. And the overgrown vassal of horror commanding them is currently doing its best impression of a particularly insectoid light goddess.

Every few seconds another colossal beam slams into Bulwark, causing the pale blue barrier to flare brilliantly before redirecting the attack somewhere else.

One blast carves through a crystal formation the size of a small office building. Another vaporizes half a tree. A third misses entirely and ruins the day of a Glasswing Raptor several hundred meters away.

The roaming boss does not seem especially concerned with friendly fire.

Marek's mana reserves, meanwhile, are being systematically assaulted by the very concept of radiance.

An unfortunate situation for everyone involved.

Especially me.

Blessings fall across the party, causing my vines to move faster and strike harder in an instant.

Sylrae wheels through the air just within the reach of Marek's Bulwark, hovering as she begins picking off moths with gravity-infused shots. Her rifle cracks repeatedly, each bullet curving through the air in ways that continue to offend both physics and my understanding of gravity.

The moths fare poorly against this strategy.

Zeke and Avelyn begin their own return fire as well, although with far less success. Fire magic and holy projectiles carve through the swarm here and there, but neither possesses the sheer efficiency of a sniper rifle being wielded by someone whose Perception stat borders on the unreasonable.

Rin, meanwhile, can't really do anything besides fire his weak ice lances, one at a time.

Even I wouldn't trust my Dexterity to casually sprint through the amount of magical artillery currently flying around outside Bulwark. Asking Rin to do so would be less a combat strategy and more an elaborate assassination attempt.

His turn will have to wait.

I am similarly occupied.

Maintaining a localized projection while controlling this many vines requires my boots to remain firmly attached to the ground, leaving me relegated to defensive support for the moment.

Rin seems deeply offended by approximately fourteen consecutive seconds of inactivity.

“Didn't know you could do more than four.”

A cluster of incoming lances explodes against my vines as I redirect them away from the party.

The moths are beginning to learn.

Several have started coordinating their fire, focusing attacks on individual sections of Bulwark and my defensive perimeter rather than firing randomly.

Mildly concerning.

“I can do considerably more than this,” I reply. “Controlling them simply requires concentration.”

I send a brief prayer to the stars that he interprets this statement correctly.

He does not.

Tragic.

“You know, I've been wondering this since I met you. Why don't you make weapon constructs and have the vines use those?”

…

I pause.

That is actually a decent idea.

It immediately runs into the issue of potentially damaging my carefully cultivated dancer aesthetic, which places it directly into the mental garbage bin.

Then I remember that giant floating weapons are also exceptionally dramatic.

The garbage bin catches fire.

The idea is promoted back onto the task list.

I tap a finger against my chin.

“Scythes.”

Rin nods solemnly.

“The only correct choice.”

I nod back.

He is, unfortunately, correct.

That is a problem for future Lyn, however.

Present Lyn has a more important task.

For the first time since she gained her new skill, Sylrae is fighting close enough for me to properly observe her gravity manipulation through my gravity sense.

Not only that, but my current inability to move presents the perfect chance to do so.

My eyes narrow.

My focus shifts.

Rin continues talking.

His words are immediately demoted to background noise.

At the moment, the subtle distortions surrounding Sylrae's shots are slightly more important than whatever opinion he has formed about hypothetical vine-wielded agricultural equipment.

Another rifle shot cracks through the cavern.

A field appears.

The bullet's trajectory changes.

The fluctuation only exists for a fraction of a second, leaving me precious little time to observe it.

Only enough to notice one thing.

The distortion doesn't pull inward the way gravity should. In fact, it doesn't resemble a gravity well at all.

My ears perk despite the continued presence of the moths.

Interesting.

A second shot follows. Then a third.

My attention sharpens further as reflected attacks continue detonating throughout the forest around us.

For once, I find myself paying less attention to the explosions.

With so little observation time, it takes several more shots before the pattern finally clicks into place.

The bullet trajectories aren't really bending at all.

At least, not in the way they should be.

A proper gravity well would pull the projectile toward its center. The path would curve as the bullet was dragged off course.

This is different.

The field isn't pulling the bullet anywhere. It's changing the direction of motion itself.

…

Ah, I see.

Magic.

I am still acting as though gravity only works within the framework of physics.

But this is a magical world. Things do not always behave the way physics dictates they should.

I raise a hand slightly.

Sylrae's gravity fields aren't acting like an omnipresent force at all.

They are acting like roads.

Gravity-aspected Astral Energy floods my fingertips.

Honestly, I should have figured this out a long time ago.

I can increase my own gravity significantly without affecting anything above or below me. I can reduce it without launching nearby objects into the sky. My manipulation has always been strangely localized, isolated from the surrounding environment in a way that actual gravity simply... isn't.

At most, it would affect small patches of grass at my feet, or leaves drifting just slightly too close.

But that's it.

At the time, I accepted it because magic.

In retrospect, that was perhaps not the most rigorous scientific approach.

Adaptation is necessary.

I need to rewrite my understanding of Gravity.

Fundamentally, gravity is the tendency of things to move along spacetime shaped by mass and energy. 

The apparent "force" arises from the way mass and energy deform spacetime. That displacement creates a well, and other things fall toward it. 

At least, that is how gravity works according to physics.

I seize control of the nearby gravitational field.

My Astral Energy possesses no mass whatsoever, yet it still exerts a gravitational influence. The force is formed entirely from energy, much in the same way that even a massless photon contributes to gravity.

So why am I treating it as though it can only alter the magnitude of an existing pull?

The answer is obvious.

Because that is how gravity behaves on Earth.

But Sylrae's fields aren't increasing gravity. They aren't decreasing it.

The bullet enters the field, and "down" changes.

My ears twitch.

Interesting.

Very interesting.

Existing gravity pulls me toward the ground. My manipulation changes how strongly it pulls.

Perhaps I have been asking the wrong question this entire time.

Instead of changing the force, maybe I should be changing the direction. After all, if the gravity created by Astral Energy is already artificial, there is no particular reason "down" has to remain beneath my feet.

I focus every last drop of attention on the gravity sense granted by Cosmic Perception.

The guide to altering gravity had been sitting in plain sight the entire time.

I had simply been using it incorrectly.

Up until now, Cosmic Perception had been little more than a scouting tool. A way to distinguish monsters from terrain based on slight differences in density and movement. Useful, certainly, but about as exciting as using a legendary artifact to check whether a door is locked.

As I shift my attention away from the objects around me and toward gravity itself, the world abruptly changes.

A massive current unfolds within my perception.

Not the gravity generated by individual objects, or the displacement of gravity as something moves. The gravity beneath all of it. An endless river of force flowing downward through the cavern, past the crystal forest, and deeper into the world below.

Another rifle shot cracks through the air.

I immediately focus on it.

For the briefest moment, the current distorts.

Not stronger.

Directed.

The flow thickens along the bullet's trajectory, creating a narrow channel that drags it forward like a log caught in a mountain river.

Sylrae's gravity-reinforced shot.

My ears stand upright.

Fascinating.

I reach out with my own manipulation, carefully avoiding the temptation to experiment on myself.

That sounds like an excellent way to discover new and exciting forms of injury.

Instead, I seize a tiny section of the current near my hand.

The sensation is strange.

Increasing gravity feels like tightening a rope. Reducing it feels like loosening one.

This feels entirely different.

As though I am grabbing hold of the current itself and attempting to twist it sideways.

The flow resists.

Then shifts.

A pebble near my foot twitches, rolls several centimeters across the ground, then immediately stops when my concentration slips.

My tail gives an excited flick.

Success.

A very small success.

The best kind.

Those tend to become catastrophically useful later.

I try again, this time maintaining the altered flow instead of releasing it immediately.

The pebble begins rolling steadily across the stone floor.

Not because it is being pulled toward anything. As far as the pebble is concerned, downhill has simply moved.

Only when I release the manipulation does it finally settle to a stop.

My ears remain fully upright.

The eighty percent ceiling is still present, but for the first time since obtaining Gravity, I feel like I actually understand what the Aspect is doing.

Or, more accurately, I understand enough of it to begin causing problems.

Historically speaking, that is usually the important threshold.

Unfortunately, this particular discovery has been relegated firmly to the "subtle" portion of my kit.

With sufficiently unhinged manipulation of my new toy, I suspect I could eventually progress from wall-running to ceiling-running, and from ceiling-running to what is, for all practical purposes, flight.

Tragically, however, a Prismatic user distinctly should not possess Gravity manipulation.

This means I must temporarily refrain from testing anything dramatic.

A cruel fate.

Returning my attention to the battlefield, I quickly discover that reality has continued existing while I was busy committing physics.

Dead moths now litter the forest floor as Sylrae, Zeke, and Avelyn steadily thin their numbers from a distance.

My tail immediately poofs out at the sight.

The moth problem remains unresolved.

More importantly, Marek is sending me a mildly aggrieved look.

Right.

My vine control became noticeably sloppier once I started experimenting with gravity manipulation. As a result, Bulwark has been absorbing a significantly greater portion of the incoming attacks for the past minute.

My ears angle slightly outward in a manner that absolutely does not signify embarrassment.

Getting lost in a scientific breakthrough during a life-or-death battle was clearly a tactical decision.

Obviously.

I also notice Sylrae giving me a slight side-eye for… unknown reasons.

Before Marek can silently judge me any further, the massive moth lets out a screech.

A loud one.

I immediately perk up.

Ah.

Phase two.

Every boss has one.

At least this particular boss possessed the common courtesy to wait until the protagonist finished her internal physics spiral before transitioning.

Appreciated.

Moths have been upgraded to a generous zero point one out of ten.

My gaze drifts toward its enormous crystalline body.

The rating remains under review.

The creature's internal radiance begins to intensify, shifting from the soft kaleidoscopic glow that permeates the forest into something harsher.

Brighter. Whiter. More concentrated.

Hm.

I get the distinct impression that it just activated some form of enhancement skill.

Which means those already concerning light attacks are about to become even more concerning.

Assuming I am correct.

Which I am. At all times.

Obviously.

I haughtily flick my hair back.

This may result in a minor inconvenience.

A manageable one, certainly, but an inconvenience nonetheless.

Assuming, of course, that nothing suddenly and inexplicably decides to go horribly wro—

My ears twitch.

Crystal shatters somewhere deep within the forest.

Then more crystal.

Then significantly more crystal.

The sound is approaching at a frankly unreasonable speed, accompanied by the distinct sensation of something treating several centuries of geological development as a mild suggestion.

The noise grows louder.

Closer. Closer still.

Several trees collapse in the distance.

A moment later, a massive silhouette erupts from the forest in a storm of crystalline debris.

The thing does not navigate around obstacles. It simply introduces them to a new and exciting lifestyle choice known as "being rubble."

Tree-sized crystal formations explode apart.

Branches scatter through the air. Entire sections of forest cease to exist.

The creature charges straight through all of it.

Then it locks eyes with the party.

…

An ogre.

Probably.

It possesses four arms, each one gripping a crystal tree branch repurposed into a club. Its body is entirely crystalline, yet somehow remains massively muscular, as though reality itself looked at basic biology, shrugged, and decided aesthetics were more important.

Red crystal eyes burn within its head.

They absolutely should not function. They seem to anyway.

There is not a scrap of clothing on the creature.

Thankfully, there are also no anatomical details to accompany that decision.

Just smooth crystal.

The stars continue to demonstrate their mercy.

I immediately inspect it.

Then I blink.

Once.

Twice.

My ears slowly rise.

…

Hm.

Even I wasn't expecting that.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━Crystal Tyrant (Level 69 | Tier 2)[Roaming Boss]Species: Crystal BeastAspect: ForceA towering crystal giant that roams the Depths in search of worthy opposition. Its living crystal body possesses immense physical strength and durability, allowing it to overpower most opponents through brute force alone.━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━