With this sort of fight lined up, no one was pulling any punches. Haji's dash forward was covered by a barrage of ghostly arrows that were duplicates of the alchemically loaded arrow their archer had launched, and those were imdiately followed by a swarm of greenish icicles from their mage that proved to be acidic when they lted. The thick liquid fire from the alchemical payload burned underwater readily and was a useful distraction.
Haji started by launching himself at the kraken, his leap aid directly at one of its eyes. The kraken intercepted him with a tentacle, but he hadn't been expecting to reach its eyes. His maneuver simply forced it to respond by either blocking or dodging, and he responded in turn with a slashing cut that left a layer of one of his powders in the wound.
What should have happened is that the powder would dissolve into blood and sink into the kraken's flesh with a ti delay before igniting. While he was pretty certain that happened to so of the mixture, the coating protecting the kraken's skin had flowed over the wound quickly enough to absorb a portion of his powder, aning that it ignited on the surface instead of in the flesh and did far less damage.
Well, that was annoying. He'd gone through a lot of trouble making a powder mixture that would not dissolve quickly in salt water but would do so in blood or such.
His frustration distracted him on his way down from his leap, and he failed to notice a thin, frond-like tentacle that lightly brushed past him.
Agony locked up his muscles as toxins and electricity assaulted him in tandem. Haji failed at landing on his feet and instead he crashed hard while his body spasd. Fighting against the toxin and regaining control of his body cracked another seal, which at least made him feel better swiftly.
The rest of his party had not been idle while he was downed, and a small leather flask was dropped onto the sand next to him before the person who brought it turned to guard him while he recovered. Haji slamd down the freshly brewed antitoxin, saluted the alchemist with the empty flask, and grabbed his sword before scrabbling back to his feet.
Bleh, he was going to find sand everywhere.
This proved to be just a small sample of what the fight had in store for the party; it was difficult for a lee combatant to attack one of the bosses without the other one being able to retaliate, and both bosses seed to have sufficient coordination to use all of their limbs freely.
Previously, their teamwork had focused on aggressively taking advantage of openings that each provided the others, but now they needed to focus on guarding each other so that one of them could focus on attacking at a ti.
However, staying close to each other made it harder for them to keep the bosses from moving toward the archer and mage, which turned the whole thing into a moving battle that was complicated by the kraken and giant jellyfish demonstrating their own magical talents.
Haji could intercept and counter-slash water blades, but it was left to their mage to provide shielding against the lightning attacks. Fortunately, even for these bosses, spellcasting and similar powers took up enough of their concentration that they couldn't react quite as fast to lee attacks.
For his part, Haji did not attempt to attack the main body of either boss during this stage. Instead, he focused on distracting them with flash powders and testing which of his compounds exacerbated the wounds he left on their tentacles. His toxins proved to be nearly useless, as the kraken was highly resistant to acids and other corrosive agents.
The compound that released a burst of electric plasma at least worked against the kraken and it seed obvious to not bother trying against the electric jellyfish. He was happy to find that at least the cryonic compounds were effective against both bosses.
His set of experintal assaults apparently earned him the attention of the jellyfish boss, and his gaze was drawn toward one of the giant crystal eyes that had focused on him. Its soft, golden light was beautiful and it soothed his mind, making it hard to focus on anything as all he wanted to do was just relax into that peaceful embrace.
A mont later, his consciousness snapped back to reality to find his sword embedded in that giant crystal eye and both of his arms lacerated with wounds that already looked to be turning necrotic. His instincts and subconscious had been able to protect him from being entirely helpless and he'd even been able to retaliate, but at quite the cost.
Once more his body landed unceremoniously on the sands, though this ti he dragged the jellyfish with him. Wait, no, damn it, this was just a lobe, the rest of the jellyfish was still swimming around and the other seven lobes were shifting to cover its core.
It had a core?
If his jaw wasn't locked tight at the mont, Haji would have sworn at the realization that the jellyfish was based on one of the weird slis. This ti the antitoxin had to be forced into his mouth before he could recover his senses and a healing salve was hastily slapped onto his wounds, though it also made them sting more for a mont.
Agony still laced his body as he forced himself to his feet, but resentnt helped stir him to action. The particular pulse of burning and freezing sensations on one of his lacerations was well known to him; the jellyfish had copied one of his toxins!
"Don't look into those damn eyes; they might be pretty but they are a hypnotic trap. Also, turns out that it can copy poisons, so be careful." At least the interaction had slowed one boss down, but the kraken had continued its advance on the mage and archer.
Once he recovered, Haji switched up his tactics once more. "I need to go solo for this attempt, don't worry if you can't cover for ." He broke a talisman that caused fins to grow along his legs and forearms, though they were mostly for show and to channel the magic that would now let him swim fast enough for the next minute or so that he might as well be flying underwater.
He amplified this with a jump that used another batch of his powders and he took advantage of the gap that had grown between the bosses to close in on the kraken. As fast as its reflexes were, it could only bring so many tentacles to bear on him at a ti and Haji maneuvered using small explosions released from his bracers.
Haji managed to reach the base of one of the tentacles and thrust his blade in as deep as he could. It wasn't as deep as he'd have liked, but it was a start and he was now close enough to make it harder for the kraken to attack him without slapping itself.
That certainly didn't prevent it from trying to swipe him away, and he spent at least as much ti dodging and deflecting the arms as he spent attacking the creature. After a few monts of this, it suddenly spun sharply as it released a cloud of ink that left Haji choking and coughing and then jetted away so swiftly that the shockwave briefly stunned him.
When it dove down into one of the many holes dotting the walls of the canyon, Haji forced himself to yell out, "Trap! Don't follow!" The effort left him exhausted by another coughing fit.
It probably hadn't been necessary to call out a trap, all of them should have been able to figure that part out, but it seed better to be careful here. Of course, the nature of the trap was unknown, which made it quite a surprise when giant tentacles erupted throughout the canyon.
"Oh hells."
That was when four of the jellyfish's lobes broke free on their own, clearly acting independently as they launched themselves at different people in the party while the core and the remaining three lobes plus core continued their assault on the mage and archer. The four lobes left behind were those most damaged by the barrage of magic and arrows that had been focused on it.
By the ti the battle was over, Haji had broken yet another seal, which irritated even him more. A blasted boss fight of a twelve-zone dungeon shouldn't have pushed him this hard.
Of course, if it had been a single-boss fight, he probably wouldn't have broken a single seal, let alone two, but the teamwork between those two bosses synergized with their fighting styles and abilities and made it hard to focus on either of them.
All of them were exhausted and moving slowly after the boss fight, and they spent several minutes taking care of each other's wounds before attempting to figure out what their reward was. Part of the delay was waiting for their gno mage to transform back; when the jellyfish boss had gotten too close she'd used a spell to transform herself into what looked like a squid made out of fire and grappled with it.
The rest of them had been busy dealing with the giant tentacles. On the plus side, they were a lot easier to hit than the boss had been before, but on the downside, there was a lot more flesh to try and cut through.
Which is how they had discovered a couple of new things about the kraken. First, it regenerated incredibly fast; Haji had thought the wounds had simply been sealed before, not healed over. The second was that its skin and flesh had an abrasive quality sufficiently hard enough to damage even enchanted weapons. His rueful examination of the damaged outer shell of his rapier proved that.
The jellyfish had retreated after being reduced to two damaged lobes, and the kraken's tentacles disappeared after it had taken enough damage to tax its ability to heal its wounds.
When they searched around the combat area, they discovered that one of the caves had been modified into a cage, though Haji was pretty certain that any of the 'captive' r-pixies could have swum out from between the bars.
"Oh, thank you for saving us from being sacrificed to those monsters!"
"Wait, sacrificed? I thought we were supposed to beco their slaves."
"No way!" A third said, "We were supposed to beco minions or priests or sothing, I'm sure of it."
While the r-pixies were clearly smarter and more focused than their smaller cousins, their origins as pixies were still quite evident. It took a few minutes for the group to argue through what their story was supposed to be, during which ti the party figured out how to open their cage.
The cage also conveniently held 'tribute' that was supposedly going to be offered to the 'monsters'. Haji had to be careful not to laugh, a couple of his ribs were cracked and it hurt. Naturally, the tribute was entrusted to the party as a reward for saving the r-pixies.
Several of the rewarded items just happened to be close matches for the weapons that had been damaged fighting the kraken and were made of an alloy new to Haji. He was fairly certain that it would prove to be hard enough to not be eroded away so easily. What a wonderful built-in advertisent for the cool stuff you could get nowhere else. He shook away that sarcastic thought and turned back to help distribute the rest of their rewards. This was their final battle as a team, and he wanted to make sure that everyone had gotten their fair share.
When Haji checked into the onsen, he found the front desk staffed by a faun and a nixie. There was talk about so fey folk working for the dungeon that weren't inhabitants, but this was the first ti he'd t any.
He gave them the na he was using for now before saying, "I was told there might be a ssage for . Also, I'd like to rent a room." There was quite a while before the tournant began and he fully planned on enjoying the downti.
"Oh?" the faun said politely as he checked so notes, then his expression changed to surprise and he said "Oh! Yes, I do have a ssage for you, and you do not have to worry about a room. That's already been arranged for you. I think you will be quite satisfied with your accommodations."
That sounded good, but Haji was also feeling concerned for the state of his ribs. "Ah, I see. Um, is there soplace I can get a healer or sothing?" Their alchemist had been too low on supplies to take care of anything not urgent and the little bit of magic the rest of them had left was insufficient to patch everyone up completely.
"Oh, don't worry, this suite cos fully stocked with everything you should need for dical or performance needs."
Suite? And it cos stocked with what? Oh boy.
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