Luke forced a smile.

  “Alright. Anyone else want to change positions?”

  No one said a word.

  A few hunters shuffled their feet as the wind whistled through the alley, carrying the smell of fear.

  Shane checked the timer. Five minutes.

  He decided to move things along.

  “We need a strategy.”

  The boss. It was the most important topic, but everyone seemed to avoid his gaze, as if they didn’t want to think about it.

  There were three basic strategies for a dungeon breach, depending on the boss. Shane ran through them in his head.

  One, kill the boss and the minions at the same time.

  Two, ignore the minions and rush the boss.

  Three, kill all the minions first, then kill the boss.

  Since a raid ended when the boss was dead, it was easy to think that number two was the best plan, but obviously things weren’t that simple.

  Celestial-class curse would massively weaken their parties. The boss’s curse also acted ase a buff for its minions, making them too strong to ignore.

  So when fighting a celestial boss, you either had to form a party with hunters who had [Curse Resistance], or you had to prevent it from using the curse in the first place. Everyone knew that, so there was no need to explain.

  “Should we… should we try to [Bind] the boss?” someone finally asked.

  “But does anyone have a [Bind] skill that could work on an A-rank?” another hunter muttered, his words laced with despair. “My C-rank [Chain of Light] would probably snap before it even connected.”

  “I do,” a calm, deep voice said.

  Henry Stone stepped forward.

  “I could hold it for about ten minutes. We can use that time to thin out the minions.”

  It was a solid idea you’d expect from a competent tank.

  The goal of this raid wasn’t to kill the boss, after all. It was to stall for time and minimize the damage on the city until the S-rankers arrived.

  ...The problem was that the plan would never work.

  First, even the minions were a B-rank. They wouldn’t be easy to kill.

  They say a monster gets ten times stronger for every rank it goes up.

  It wasn’t an exact rule, of course. Unlike skill ranks, monster ranks or human stat ranks didn’t have a plus or minus icon, so there could be a big difference in power even between those of the same rank.

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  To deal with the minions with this number of hunters, each party would have to carefully pull each minion out of the horde with a [Taunt] skill and kill it one by one.

  But the minions controlled by Heaven’s Executioner were also Celestials. Someone had already clicked on the boss’s name in the System window and found the names of its monsters and skills.

  B-rank Holy Paladins and B-rank Sacred Roses.

  In other words, while they were trying to pull one Paladin, the Sacred Roses would be constantly spreading [Hallucination Spores], a wide-area curse skill, through the air.

  The whole battlefield would become a deadly mess if they couldn’t stop the spores.

  People would start seeing things, attacking their own allies, and the formation would break in seconds.

  “So instead of pulling the Paladins, we [Taunt] the Sacred Roses,” a hot-headed B-rank with a two-handed axe suggested. “Take out the support, then go for the knights.”

  “That seems like the right move to stop the [Hallucination Spores], but…” a C-rank hunter wearing a leather armor trailed off. “But with a name like ‘Sacred Rose,’ can they even move? What if it’s rooted to the ground? If we can’t pull them from the group…”

  The hot-headed hunter grumbled but didn’t have an answer.

  Leather armor was right. A rogue needed to be able to pull a single monster without alerting the rest of the group for the strategy to work.

  If the monster was stationary, the plan was useless.

  “Then how about this?” another hunter piped up. “We all hit the boss with our strongest skills at once, right at the start, then we run. Other party members can cover for those who have trouble escaping because of rebound or cooldowns. If the boss is hurt, it’ll be slower. That buys more time for civilians to get away.”

  Shane shook his head.

  “Heaven’s Executioner has a skill that lets it drain a portion of the minions’ health to restore its own to 100%. There’s no point in hitting the boss until every last minion is dead.”

  “How do you know—”

  “You can tell by the skill’s name, [Sacrificial Legion].”

  Of course, that was a lie. He knew it from the game. But it was a plausible one that shut the man up.

  The mood in the group dropped again.

  Not that an alpha strike with their skills would have done any meaningful damage to an A-rank celestial anyway.

  And it was doubtful how many of them would have actually followed an order to blow all their mana at the very beginning of the fight.

  [WARNING!]

  [A-rank breach is imminent.]

  [Prepare to fight!]

  The red text flashed in front of everyone’s eyes.

  The cracks in the sky had reached way over the red buildings, as if it was trying to grab the sun.

  The group devolved into panicked shouting.

  “Forget it!” someone screamed. “We can’t fight that! We need to fall back, set up a defensive line further down the street!”

  “And let it walk right into the evacuation zone? Are you insane?”

  “It’s better than all of us dying here!”

  They’re already losing it.

  Shane held back a sigh.

  This is what happened when amateurs faced a real threat.

  He’d seen it a hundred times before in his past life. A group without a clear leader and a workable plan was just a mob waiting to be slaughtered. He had to get them back on track.

  “Focus,” Shane’s voice wasn’t loud, but it was sharp enough to cut through the noise.

  Everyone stopped and looked at him, their panicked expressions frozen on their faces.

  “Our only option is to stick with Stone’s suggestion. After he [Binds] the boss, we clear the minions one by one. It’s slow, it’s dangerous. But it’s the only path that doesn’t end in you all dying in the next five minutes.”

  Luke immediately stepped forward, his voice projecting an effortless authority.

  “Hunter Ashwell is right.”

  Shane raised an eyebrow, surprised to find Luke supporting him.

  “But we won’t do this with our heads down. If Hunter Stone gives us the opening, we take it. Even if it’s just ten minutes, we pour absolute hell on the monsters before they can loose a horde that’ll flood the streets.

  “Tanks, you pull the Paladins one by one. Melee fighters, you take them down the second they’re clear of the group. Ranged DPS, you provide cover and do whatever you can to suppress the Roses and keep those spores off us. Let’s show them exactly who we are.”

  He was smart, Shane had to give him that. He took Shane’s cold logic and repackaged it into something that sounded like a heroic last stand.

  Luke turned to Shane.

  “How does that sound, Hunter Ashwell?”