B-B-B-Boss Battle!

  "Fuck this," Lacie muttered.

  Nerikayla - Level 59 Neighborhood Boss Collosopede

  Whispered of as a distant echo of Scolopendra, Nerikayla is a collosopede that feasts not only on flesh, but on magic as well. Its growth may be neverended, should it feast enough. Or not. People say it's related to Scolopendra, but look at that thing down there: It's a dumb animal. Almost as dumb as you.

  "Yeah, we're not fighting that," I agreed.

  Knowing it was coming, Lacie grabbed on as I lifted her. Megapedes were coming over the lip below as I fled. I was faster, and I knew the route I was taking, and I did not slow down. Struggling to breath from skating about twenty miles with Lacie in my arms, I skidded to a halt.

  "Why are we stopping?" she asked.

  "They're still following. They'll follow us all the way."

  "Fuck." Lacie understood exactly what I was worried about. We could fight megapedes fine in small numbers in open spaces, but while we tried to crawl through the rubble we were helpless. If they ever got to the town, we were dead, full stop.

  "I can go down, fight them there."

  "Aside from the boss, there's like twenty thousand of those things!"

  "I can do it. I swear I can. But you'll be on your own, and some might follow you."

  She took a quick breath, thinking. "I believe you, but no, go to that boss chamber we skipped."

  I had a bunch of worries, but I could feel the vibrations from two levels down, so there wasn't time to plan. I sped back, down another floor, and towards the oncoming horde of megapedes.

  "I thought it was still clear!" Lacie yelled, tucking her head against my shoulder.

  "Don't worry," I said.

  I slowed, adjusted to hold her in only one arm, and took out Luxury's huge sword. The dragon's breath blasted down the hall, killing almost forty megapedes in an instant.

  They still weren't clear as far as I needed to go. All out, I built speed, skidded up onto a wall, and shot over the leading edge of the swarm. As I quick-stepped across the backs of snapping megapedes, Lacie said, "Please don't die, please don't die, please don't die," into my shoulder.

  "Don't worry, this sort of stuff is easy," I told her, building speed as I swerved into a side-corridor, the megapedes thinning out beneath me.

  And then we were clear, up more stairs, through three turns, a long straightaway, and at the doors. I set her down and pressed on the door. It didn't open.

  "Oh fuck," she said.

  "Yeah," I agreed.

  "Try a fastball, see if they're indestructible."

  I wound up, threw, and it bounced off. I got spinning, sent one way faster, and again did no damage. "We need to go back, now."

  "No," she said. "That didn't damage it, but I saw the door wobble. They open, we just need to figure out how."

  While she was looking at the pattern, muttering to herself, I had another idea. "Can you cast that prolonged-healing thing on me, so I'll recover after I injure myself?"

  "What are you planning?"

  "Please hurry."

  Not delaying me for an explanation, she applied soothing stream.

  I went into a wide turn. It's an odd thing with skates, or with the skate skill, that I could lean in at the center of a circle, my feet hitting along the curve, and just keep speeding up. Leaning low wasn't as good as a proper velodrome, but it was something. As I went faster, I lay flatter and flatter, getting my "skates" at a sharper angle against the floor to prevent me from sliding aside. Even with my phenomenal tumbling skill, which let me do any amount of flips without losing track of the ground, I was starting to get dizzy.

  That didn't count as spinning for my Flippy Shit skill, but it did give me the speed I needed. Then I tucked tight, lowering one shoulder, turning the wide turn into a spin on just the toes, rotating at a blinding speed.

  I kept it going until I could hear the megapedes approaching, then forced enough focus to aim where I'd come out.

  I didn't try a fastball. If the door was indestructible it was indestructible. No, the tucked shoulder was meant to start another attack. Based on everything I'd tried so far, I was confident that, with that shoulder tucked early on and still leading now, the system would count this as one extended Illegal Checking maneuver.

  New Achievement! It's over 10,000!

  You managed to get a damage multiplier of over 10,000% on an attack. In your case, you got a damage multiplier of 27,600%

  Reward: They're probably about to patch that ability so you can never do it again.

  New Achievement! Bypass

  You opened a door that was supposed to be impassable without solving the correct riddle. It's impressive how dumb you have to be to go to this much trouble when you could have just push the right button.

  Reward: You've received a Silver I-Didn't-Do-The-Quest Box.

  The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

  As I collapsed in agony, one half of the double doors shot aside, slamming into the pocket it was supposed to retract into. Lacie grabbed my good shoulder and started dragging me, ignoring my wail of pain. She cast soothing flood as she dragged me in, saying, "Holy fuck that was incredible."

  I screamed as my thoroughly mangled shoulder caught in the door's track. I was healing swiftly, though. By the time the megapedes poured into the outer chamber, I was over half health, struggling upright and pushing Lacie behind me. I prepared for battle, only to watch as seven megapedes were reduced to pulp by the door closing.

  The boss music stopped. I sighed and sat down.

  Admin Notice: An ability in your skill list has been placed under lock while it is reviewed.

  Lacie said, "Did the world just flicker a bit?"

  "I got an admin—"

  Admin Notice: An ability in your skill list has been modified. Flippy Shit will now use a log function.

  "Well darn."

  "It did it again."

  New Achievement! Game the System

  You got an ability modified because you managed to exploit it so well. Unfortunately for you, you're not important enough for me to fight for you, so you just got butt-fucked by the admins. I bet you like the thought of that, you little gooner bitch.

  Reward: You've received a Platinum Now That's What I Call Gaming the System #47 Box

  I read her the notices and achievements. We checked my skill, and now it just said that damage would "increase" for each rotation between readying and launching an attack, rather than giving an exact percentage.

  "Let's be honest," Lacie said. "We both knew that was too good. A shame you couldn't send your only 27,000% damage fastball at a boss, though."

  "As an added bonus, I just got 4 skill levels of Flippy Stuff for doing that nonsense."

  She grinned and gave me a quick peck on the lips. "That's excellent. Now, let's find out where we've trapped outselves to die."

  Stepping away from me, she lit a torch, revealing a truly massive chamber. One torch couldn't even reach the other side. She threw it, and it just lit a patch of floor.

  I lit one and sent it as a fastball to the other side, where it obliterated itself on a stone wall. "I would wager that's exactly 200 meters."

  "Exactly?" she asked.

  "The whole place is exact, and I've run the 200 since I was ten. I have a decent sense of it."

  Lacie measured it out all the same, getting to 70 meters when she came into sight of the massive machine at the center of the room. She measured again from there and was at 79 meters, but off-center. The room was almost certainly a 200 meter radius circle, we'd just not been going straight across.

  At the center was a huge metal rod, maybe five meters across, extending up through the ceiling and down into the floor. There were massive gears on it, grinding along tracks in the floor where they interlocked with the tops of other gears.

  "So, there's something up above that's turning this shaft," I said. "It goes down, transfering the energy into three different systems."

  Lacie snort-laughed. "I always forget you still have that old tractor."

  I didn't excel at school, but when you have to help fix everything on the farm, basic gear-interactions become normal. "This is not a complex system. At least not up here. At this point, it's basically just a drive shaft. What the power does below, who knows."

  "It's a drive shaft that's 5 meters thick. The drive shaft on a car is, what, two inches thick?"

  My eyes widened. "Whatever's down there is going to be enormous."

  "I'll bet you ten thousand gold coins that there's a giant mechanical boss in the room just below us, and we need to kill it to clear this quadrant."

  "So, we need to stop this from turning."

  Lacie took a stone twice the size of her head from her inventory. It fell into the gear track, got pinched between the gear and the floor, and exploded in a spray of shrapnel.

  Lacie potioned. "Do we have anything that's, you know, more indestructible?"

  "If they hadn't already changed my Flippy Stuff skill, I'd try a powerful throw, but do we honestly think we can break it directly, instead of with some component we're supposed to find elsewhere in the dungeon?"

  Lacie sighed, pacing about the room. As she wandered, I tested some fastballs, just to be sure. I made sure I was hitting the gears on the side she wasn't on, so the ricochets didn't hit her, and I was careful not to lodge my Heavy Steel Ball in the actual gear-tracks where I worried it could be crushed.

  Unsurprisingly, even spinning up as best I could, I didn't scratch the surface. This was clearly something that was meant to be handled in a very specific manner.

  "Do you know how to re-open these doors," I yelled. She was on the far edge of the circle.

  Lacie: No need to yell. And no. Why?

  Maddy: If you figure something out here, that's great, but I think we might need to go through all those megapedes.

  Lacie: You want to, what, just walk out into the swarming mass of them?

  Maddy: Well... yes.

  Lacie: Get over here.

  I did so. She made a broad gesture at another door. "There are three doors in total. Remember that map? This floor's in thirds. We had that one wall we ran into, that was because the segment protected from the blast wasn't aligned, so we have the gap between two thirds right there."

  "Can we open these doors."

  "I think so." She rapidly tapped the junction points on the circuit-diagram of the door in a specific order. Nothing happened.

  "One second." She tried again, a third time, just kept going. On try number nine, the door started grinding slowly open.

  "I would have given up about five tries ago."

  "There's a lot of guesswork, since we never found the key to it, but it's not a super-complex system. Well, not on this side."

  As the door opened fully, we found ourselves looking out on a starlit sky.

  "Other door?" Lacie asked.

  I nodded.

  The third door had about ten feet of cracked flooring on the other side before it fell away.

  I stared into the distance. "So, whatever was in those segments is just gone."

  "You know," Lacie said, "I think this is good for us."

  "How on earth is this good?"

  She gestured at the vast expanse of destruction. "That's two-thirds of our subterranean region. We were maybe half-way down one third, had found nothing of value, and had already blown through five of our fifteen days. If we could keep going, we might have fooled ourselves into think it was possible. Now, we know we can't do this fair and have to find a way to cheat it."

  She was, as usual, correct.

  "So, how do we cheat?" I asked

  "Presumably, if we can get into the room below, we can just fight the boss. We're supposed to do something here to weaken him, but that's gonna be impossible. Fighting him at full power will suck, be we just have to assume it's possible. The question is, how do we get down to him?"

  "You think he's directly below us?"

  She produced the knotted rope and said, "Hold on tight and I'll check."

  I went along until I saw she was going to be walking out onto the side to look down the exterior better. "Um, no. If you fall, you'll die."

  "And you won't?"

  "Remember, I have double jump. I can do some seriously weird stuff to survive while anywhere near a wall. I could probably run up this tower if I had to, although it'd be way easier on the inside edge of this curve."

  "Fair enough." She braced herself on the wall and held the rope as I stepped out the side and looked down. "Do you see any doors?"

  "No, it's a clean surface all the way down."

  "We know that the town is above this, so if the next chamber wasn't the boss, there would be some other way in."

  I said, "Sure, but if we want in, I can get us in."

  "How?"

  "When I was trying to damage the shaft, I took chips out of the floor. The exterior of the chamber is indestructible, but the floor beneath us is not."

  Lacie gave an obviously forced grin. "Well, it sounds like we have a certified totally-safe plan that couldn't possibly end in disaster."