Chapter 62. Exhaustion and Expletives

  Hex of Exhaustion. Reducing your stamina and mana regeneration by 10 per second.

  I located the totem behind Clarity, emitting waves of purple light that spread through most of the room in an arc, well past where I stood.

  “Get back!” I yelled. “The hex has a limited range. We need to stay out of it.” I ran backwards, away from Clarity. My stamina fell rapidly, though, and by the time I reached the edge of the aura, I stumbled out, barely making it to safety. My stamina fell to zero. Janica despawned. Thankfully, I knew I could get her back when my stamina returned.

  Around the room, several of the melee fighters had reached the outside of the hex, but the casters struggled. Many crawled on the ground away from the source, trying to escape. A few lay there, unable to move.

  “If you have Stamina, help them!” I yelled.

  Arthur downed a potion, his stamina refilling to half. He started tossing yellow potions to his guildies. He ran for a caster, who lay within the hex, unable to move. Arthur grabbed the caster by the hand and ran them outside of the hex, their body sliding across the floor. Arthur didn’t stop to rest, instead going right back in. He pulled two more out within seconds, but they were those closest to the edge. Thomas ran in and grabbed Kab, pulling him to safety.

  And that’s when Clarity started bombing us with potions. Or rather, those trapped inside of the hex.

  Christian had run in to save Raspberry, but the moment he reached her hand, a blue potion landed next to her, freezing her legs in place. Christian tugged at her but couldn’t move her. He let go, and ran back to the edge, rolling out of the purple area.

  With enough stamina regenerated, I summoned Janica back again.

  “What happened?” she said, looking around. “Oh no.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  Six casters remained trapped. And Clarity had thrown a poison vial at each of them. I watched, helpless, as their health ticked down slowly. The two healers who had made it out of the hex casted healing spells on the people who were trapped, but their mana had nearly depleted.

  Clarity laughed, a cackle that shook the room. Like the Wicked Witch of the West had just sent her monkeys to capture Dorothy.

  I pulled the Glyph of Dampening and my pliers out my inventory. I reconnected the ends of the wire. I ran to Arthur. “Here,” I said. “Use this.” It still had some charge left. 10/60.

  He looked at me and nodded. “Keep them alive,” he said, then bolted for Raspberry. He grabbed her hand and pulled her to safety. Arthur sprinted toward another healer, but the moment he did, Clarity released three potions all at once at him.

  He saw the potions and retreated backwards.

  Thunder and Lightning were the furthest from us and closest to Clarity. Their health fell and fell, the poison slowly draining their life. We watched in horror as they died. Slowly.

  Arthur ran left toward a dps. Clarity threw three potions at him, one green, one red, one blue. The second they were in the air, Arthur switched directions, racing toward Olivia, the healer who had been part of Thomas’s group. He picked her up, her health nearly extinguished, and ran her to safety. Olivia got a last minute heal from Kab, saving her life.

  Clarity screamed, enraged by Arthur’s fake-out.

  The last person trapped was Reeba, the Geomancer. But she was much closer to Clarity than to us. Arthur tried to run for her, but three potions flew at him. He dodged to the right and three more flew through the air. He stopped and came back to us. Seconds later, Reeba died, laying on the ground, unable to move or act in any way.

  We stood, around the edge of the purple arc, staring at Clarity, who stared back at us.

  Arthur handed the dampener back to me. “Thanks,” he said. “At least we saved a few.”

  We were down to fifteen raid members. We’d lost both lightning mages, two melee fighters, and a healer.

  Then Clarity sat down on her throne and started reading again.

  “What the hell is Clarity doing?” Christian asked. “I’ve never seen a boss do this before.”

  “I don’t know,” Arthur said. “But I don’t like it.”

  “She’s downloading information,” I said. “She cares more about finishing that than fighting us. And she doesn’t have to. We’re trapped back here.”

  “Can we destroy the totem?” Cassandra asked.

  “If we can get to it,” I said. “But with that stamina reduction and all of her freezing potions, it seems like a lost cause. We’d just end up dead around her feet.”

  “Can we attack her from here?” Rowan asked. “Warren, throw a Fireball her way.”

  I wiggled my fingers, the ASL for fire. I said the words. I casted a second one.

  Two stacks of the debuff appeared on her nameplate.

  232 Fire damage over 7 seconds.

  Clarity didn’t seem to care. She opened a book, flipping the pages in a blur. She threw it to the side.

  “Her health bar isn’t moving,” Arthur said. “Not even a little bit.”

  People began whispering to each other, doubt creeping into the raid.

  “Look,” Cassandra said, her finger pointed past the boss. “Look at the red tank behind Clarity.”

  I inspected it.

  Capacity 97/100.

  “As we thought,” Arthur said. “We have to drain those tanks with our mana. Blitz, throw some ice spells at her. Let’s see if that drains the blue tank. Raspberry, help Warren with the red tank.”

  “Our lightning mages and our geomancer are all dead,” I said. “I’m going to have to take lightning to drain the yellow tank.”

  “Let me try something,” Olivia said. She casted Rejuvenate 2 on Clarity.

  “It’s working,” Cassandra said. “The yellow tank just dropped to 99%.”

  “Alright,” Arthur said. “Everyone use whatever spells you can. We have four tanks to drain. Red, yellow, blue, and purple.”

  Clarity sat, undisturbed, as we pelted her with spells. The room became a light show. Red, blue, and gold streaks flying through the air. A barrage of color and magic.

  The tanks began to drain, slowly. All except the purple one, which sat full, unaffected by anything we had. And my mind began to race. If we couldn’t drain that purple tank, we wouldn’t be any better off than we were now. Was it possible for me to invent a shadow spell in time? I’d seen some hexes, and the mobs on the first level of the dungeon had casted some shadow bolts. Witches used shadow magic, which means that illusions were probably in the shadow family. But the problem was that even if I invented a shadow spell, I wouldn’t be able to change my Loadout. I would get a single cast of a shadow spell. How would that help other than to bring the tank down to 99%? Unless the spell I created could use an unlimited amount of magic.

  It took us almost fifteen minutes to drain the tanks, but eventually it worked. Red, yellow, and blue were empty. We had less than thirty minutes to beat the boss and every minute mattered.

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  “I want to try something,” Arthur said. He stepped into the hex. His stamina and mana drained, but Clarity didn’t hurl a potion at him.

  Arthur gathered us close, in a huddle. “I think the tanks were her fire power as well,” he said.

  “What could we do though?” Christian asked. “We can’t drain the purple tank.”

  “What if we charged her,” Thomas suggested. “All at the same time.”

  “I like it,” Janica said. “It’s risky, but if we could get to the totem and destroy it, then we can get as close as we need.”

  “But what does that matter?” I asked. “We still can’t drain the purple tank. She’s immune to all damage. Even if we could walk up to her.”

  “Maybe she’s not immune to physical damage,” Christian said. He turned and fired an arrow at her. It sailed through the air, but bounced off. The word “immune” floated above the boss.

  Arthur shook his head. “We have to get that shadow tank down to get past this phase.”

  “I have an idea,” I said. “I don’t know if it’ll work, but if I could invent a channeled spell, maybe I could drain the purple tank.” I looked around the huddle, meeting the eyes of our remaining members. “Has anyone ever seen a channeled spell before? Or know anything about shadow magic?”

  Most people shook their heads.

  “I’ve seen advanced mages use a spell called Disintegrate,” Janica said. “It’s a channeled fire spell. But I don’t know anything about it.”

  “It might be possible,” I said. I looked at the other casters. “We should all start trying. If we invent a shadow spell, it removes some of that tank. We’re going to have to work together. We only get one spell per invention, so if you get a channeled spell, don’t stop the cast. Let it go as long as you can last.”

  “We can help,” Rowan said. “There’s nothing to prevent a melee Job from casting spells.”

  “Great,” I said. “We need to figure this out piece by piece. First, do shadow spells use Intelligence, Wisdom, or some other stat as a multiplier? Next, we don’t know the sign language or the Latin for a spell that is maintained.”

  “I know sign language,” Vivian said.

  Everyone turned to her.

  She shrugged. “I’m deaf in real life.”

  “But you can hear normally in the game?” I asked. “And speak?”

  She smiled. “Pretty amazing, huh?”

  I started. Somehow, the technology in this game allowed people to overcome their disabilities by interacting directly with their brains. I looked around, wondering for the first time if anybody here was physically disabled. Or blind.

  Vivian showed us the sign language for a few words that might help: channel, stream, and link.

  “What about the Latin ?” I said. “Can anybody speak it in real life?”

  Silence greeted me.

  I sighed. “Okay, that’s not good. Let’s break up and try to figure out what we can. Vivian, will you help people with sign language words?”

  She made a fist and bobbed it back and forth like a head nodding.

  “That means yes,” Cassandra said.

  Vivian winked at her.

  Thankfully, I was out of combat, and I was able to change my Job to Instructor. I moved away from the group, sat down and thought. I had to adapt some of the Latin I knew into a channeled spell. I knew the words for “greater” and for “lesser”. I knew the phrases “area of effect” and “nova". I wished that I had studied Latin in high school.

  A prompt interrupted my thought process.

  Kab demonstrated the basics of Shadow bolt. Would you like to teach him the spell? Yes/No.

  I accepted the prompt.

  A purple ball of energy exploded from Kab’s hands. It shot across the room at Clarity.

  Clarity looked up, surprised. And annoyed. Then she went back to reading.

  The purple tank’s reserves went down to 99%.

  People cheered.

  “Just ninety-nine more spells,” Cassandra said.

  Kab shared the spell for Shadow bolt with everyone.

  One by one, shadow bolts shot from people’s hands, every one of them reducing the shadow tank by 1%. By the end of the round, Clarity was down to 85%.

  “Okay,” Cassandra said, counting on her fingers. “All we really need is six more spells.”

  Six more. We might find three or four more if we were lucky. Meanwhile, Clarity raced ahead, closer and closer to her goal. I looked at the clock. Twenty-five minutes to shutdown. I needed a bigger breakthrough.

  I motioned to Janica to join me. “You know some Latin,” I said, recalling some of the expletives she had blurted out.

  “Not really,” she said. “Except all the curse words.”

  “Right,” I said. “But there has to be a curse that uses a word like ‘channel’ or ‘link’ maybe?”

  “Not that I can think of,” she said.

  “What about ‘beam’ or ‘ray’?”

  She shook her head.

  “Okay,” I said. “What about ‘stream’?”

  “Nope,” she said. But then a thoughtful look came over her face. Followed by a mischievous look.

  “What?” I said.

  “Nothing,” she said. “It’s too much for your delicate sensibilities.”

  I waved for her to share.

  “Well,” she said. “There’s this expression. Ire bibere rivum urinae .”

  “Which means?” I asked, my eyebrows furrowed.

  “Go drink a stream of urine,” she said.

  “Gross.”

  She shrugged. “Told you you were sensitive.”

  “But,” I said. “That might just work.”

  “Vivian,” I said. “How do you say ‘stream’ in ASL?”

  She showed me.

  “Okay.” I started putting together the spell for Shadow Stream. The sign language and Latin were simple enough. I knew from Shadow bolt that shadow used an even split of Intelligence and Wisdom. “Here goes.”

  I stood up. I made a finger to represent a person, then gesticulated a shadow with my other hand. I stacked one hand above the other, fingers apart, palms down, and waved them side to side like water flowing. I pictured a stream of shadow in my head.

  A weight came over me, like the presence of something dangerous. A purple, electric energy began growing from my hands. My heart started beating. I focused on Clarity and released the energy.