Ethan soared through the air above the rocky basin, Lyla held securely on his back. It was a bizarre ga of aerial keep-away.
The mont the lumbering behemoth chased them to the basin’s edge, Ethan would swing back around. Lyla would unleash a blistering volley of arrows. The creature, baffled, would turn its massive bulk and trundle back into the basin’s depths. Then, Ethan would simply fly back over the ridge.
Frustrated by the terrain, the monster would try to skirt the basin’s rim, attempting to flank them. That’s where Leo and the others ca in. Their job was to body-block, slow it down, and keep it tangled in the basin for as long as possible, while the ranged classes poured on the damage.
Rinse and repeat. An infinite, infuriating loop.
"Eighty percent! All lee, disengage now! Shield Tanks, you hold the line!" Ethan’s voice crackled over the guild channel.
The raid was composed of elite mbers, and their discipline was impeccable. The mont he spoke, lee fighters scattered, using every mobility skill they had to put distance between themselves and the creature’s massive feet.
"Kiara, get that Battle Resurrection ready! The second Leo eats it, you pick him up!" Ethan commanded.
"Already on it!" Kiara’s hands were already dancing in the air, the pre-cast glow of a spell shimring around her fingers.
"All Healers, focus everything on the Shield Tanks! Their survival is on you! Tanks, pop Last Stand and Shield Wall together... now!" Ethan tid it perfectly.
As the word "now" left his lips, a chorus of tallic THUMPS echoed from below. Over two hundred Shield Walls activated simultaneously—a truly impressive sight. Their forms swelled slightly, radiating a crimson aura—the telltale sign of the Last Stand ability, boosting their maximum health by forty percent. Combined with Shield Wall’s fifty percent damage reduction, they were as fortified as they could be.
Right at that mont, the Mana-Forged Colossus let out a series of low, resonant hums. Glowing crimson patterns ignited across its dark green chassis. Then, impossibly for sothing so large, it jumped. It ca down hard in a motion Victor had crudely described as "taking a dump."
BOOM...
Its feet hit the ground, triggering a Thunder Stomp. The earth shattered in a spiderweb of fissures. The health bars of every Shield Tank plumted.
Instantly, a cascade of healing light poured down from the ridge, massive area-of-effect spells blanketing the tanks. They all stabilized, clinging to life by a thread.
All except one.
A beam of verdant light shot down, and a corpse on the ground stirred and rose. It was Leo. The guild’s best-geared Main Tank.
"Of course it’s you. I’m not even surprised," Ethan’s voice was dry over the comms. "I told you to hold position, not fight for the number two spot on the threat ter. You just had to push it, didn’t you?"
Before Leo could even form a reply, Ethan continued, "Keep this up, and you can strip your gear and hand it over to soone who’ll listen. Maybe you’d be happier helping Celia count inventory in Logistics."
"No, boss! I’m sorry!" Leo’s voice was instantly contrite, his earlier bravado gone. He’d been getting a bit too full of himself lately, and Ethan knew it. This was a deliberate check. If you didn’t rein Leo in, he’d try to steer the whole ship.
"Sorry doesn’t cut it. A Shield Tank is the anchor of this raid. Your recklessness makes the whole team pay the price. So here’s the new rule... from now on, if your team wipes because of a mistake you made, you’re personally covering half the repair bill."
Raiding was funded by the guild, and a single wipe could get expensive. For an individual, covering half was a serious hit. Leo was speechless.
A snicker ca over the channel. "Told you so, you glory hound. Knew you’d get slapped down eventually." It was atball, the lead Warlock in Leo’s squad. He knew Leo’s tendencies all too well; he’d been the one to quietly suggest Kiara have that Battle Rez ready.
Leo, chastened in front of a thousand people, didn’t argue. "Heh, yeah, boss, ssage received. How about... we make it twenty percent?" he ventured, trying to negotiate.
Ethan’s reply was imdiate. "Sure. Let’s make it sixty percent. It’s settled."
"Wait, what? No, no, no! Fifty! We said fifty!" Leo yelped, his panic audible as he slamd his shield up to block a stomp from the Colossus.
Ethan didn’t respond further, already swooping back into the ga of aerial tag with Lyla. The primary damage ca from her endless stream of specialized arrows. The other players’ attacks against the Colossus’s Arcane Core did piddling damage—a few dozen, maybe a hundred points. Hits anywhere else on its body rely registered as a pathetic "-1."
In a straight-up fight on level ground, the ranged classes wouldn’t even be able to hit its core. At the current average player level, damaging the Mana-Forged Colossus was supposed to be impossible. Even its exposed core would have been immune if not for the fact that every one of the thousand-plus Renegade Alliance mbers here was among the best-geared players on the server.
"Leafshade!" Ethan’s voice cut through the comms again.
A few seconds of silence passed.
Leafshade: "Uh... ?" He sounded genuinely surprised.
"See anyone else here nad Leafshade?" Ethan asked, amused.
"Doesn’t look like it," Leafshade replied.
"Right. This thing isn’t complicated. Every twenty percent health, it does its big ’sit-down’ move. If that kills more than ten people, it enrages. So keep the deaths under ten. But you can’t just ignore it, or it activates so kind of turbo boost and moves like it’s mainlining caffeine. At five percent, it goes truly berserk, spamming the stomp and the jump. That’s the whole fight. You have command. I’m getting dizzy flying in circles."
With that, Ethan transferred raid lead permissions to Leafshade.
"Wait, hold on," Leafshade was stunned, first by the info dump, then by the system notification. "Are you... sure about this?"
His hesitation was clear. Ethan had just finished publicly dressing down Leo. And it wasn’t just Leo; Victor and Williams were here too—the other founding mbers of the guild. Handing command to Leafshade, even for one fight, could be seen as sidelining the old guard.
"What happened to the guy I recruited? The one with all the big ideas? You gone soft on ?" Ethan’s tone was challenging. "And I don’t an just for this fight. I an for all future raids, loot distribution, the works. Guild progression, strategy, everything... it’s yours to run."
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