The Apocalypse Grinder - Chapter 300

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Ronan watched with horror as the chunks of flesh and dismembered scales that floated on the surface of the sea started to move. Where smaller pieces of the boss touched, they merged into a larger whole. The shock of there being no kill notification after he had blown Azbab up was one thing, but watching it regenerate from nothing was another.

Unfortunately for the boss Ronan was no dithering idiot. Unlike the foolish villains in most popular shows and comics, he wasn’t going to sit around while his enemy received a power up and regenerated. He went to form his new spell, and then realised it wasn’t suited for the task.

Instead, one of his former skills would do the job far better. He had managed to use most of his old skills with sorcery, despite the lack of ability to shift his mana to match their elemental attunement, perhaps due to the fact he once had them as skills. Recreating anything not formed of pure mana that he had not had as a skill had proved impossible. Ronan raised a hand while trying to spot every piece of the boss’ flesh that remained.

When he felt he had them all in his mind’s eye, he closed his eyes and reached into his heart. A few seconds later the world flashed white as a huge lightning bolt descended from the man hopping in the air and struck the ocean. The energy dispersed across the surface, and every part of the kaiju’s body that it hit was burnt to a crisp.

Ronan let out a sigh of relief only when he saw that every last chunk of flesh, scale, or odd bit of viscera had been incinerated. The burnt bits still floated on the sea, but he doubted that even a boss monster kaiju could regenerate from that state.

And yet there still wasn’t a kill notification. Ronan stared with rapt horror as all of the pieces of Azbab’s body began to glow bright red and then shoot towards one another. A large mass of red, pulsating flesh hovered just above the surface of the ocean. Ronan tossed another spell at it, but it exploded harmlessly against the bulky orb of kaiju meat and scales.

What the fuck!? A string of expletives too foul to be vocalised ran through his mind. He hadn’t expected defeating a level 500 boss monster to be an easy feat, but this went beyond what was reasonable. It had to be due to the administrator’s interference. The monster Ronan was faced with was certainly not something that anyone should fight in a tutorial, even if it was nightmare difficulty. Of that he could be sure.

Ronan used Ethereal Slash mixed with all his offensive skills, but even that failed to leave more than a scratch on the surface of the writhing mass of flesh. With every second it grew larger, twisting and morphing into something new. He half expected a completely different monster to emerge. I guess it’s like a second phase. A lot of games had those sorts of bosses, but I didn’t expect it to happen in real life.

He didn’t have to wait much longer for the transformation to complete. Except what appeared was more than he’d expected. The ball of flesh burst and a monster looking identical to the previous boss appeared. Then it leapt to one side, revealing a second identical monster. Ronan cursed and quickly looked at the tags above the two monsters’ heads.

[Azbab - BOSS][Mutated Kaiju Lv.500]

[Azbab - BOSS][Mutated Kaiju Lv.500]

Nothing had changed apart from the fact that there were now two bosses. Ronan had a terrible premonition about what might happen the next time he managed to kill one of the bastards. Don’t tell me it’s some sort of immortal monster. How the hell am I supposed to defeat this thing, Administrator? Another string of unrepeatable expletives, this time directed at the administrator, ran through his mind.

Unfortunately he didn’t have infinite time to curse his overlord out because both of the kaiju had noticed him and were chittering at one another. Oh great, they can talk.

He only had enough time to conjure a sword and apply fresh seeker marks to his new opponents before they jumped at him. He also ran into an issue with one of them when the mark simply refused to be applied.

That was a problem to worry about when he had the chance. Twelve claws carved through the air towards him. Ronan swung his blade and unleashed a huge Ethereal Slash. The claws struck it. The boss on the right was stopped in its tracks, claws repelled by the strike. However, the one on the right punched through the blade of mana and slashed Ronan’s chest open.

Seven deep furrows appeared, immediately leaking a torrent of blood down his chest. He applied Suture Wound while retreating, but the bosses had no intention of letting him escape. Both picked up the pace as they bounced after him, beginning a lethal game of cats and mouse over the ocean.

Ronan quickly realised he was severely outmatched. A harsh blow crashed into his side, breaking a rib and sending him flying. He tried to slow his fall but the summoned platform only caused him to crash against it, the mana shattering apart as he continued to plummet.

He hit the water hard, and felt like one of his discs had slipped. The battle had gone from bad to great to worse, and he was feeling, once more, like he’d been scammed. Unfortunately quitters never won and Ronan was definitely not a quitter. He might die, but he would squeeze as much as he could from the two bosses before that happened.

He tried to use Minor Heal on his broken bones but all it did was seal them back together. The way his chest flared with pain when he shifted a little too hard told him that it was far from a perfect fix. His spine wasn’t bending properly, either, but there was little he could do about it.

The two bosses splashed into the water on either side of him. Ronan started jumping, trying to gain as much height as he could. The kaiju were much faster in the water than the air and he had no desire to be hit by them moving at full speed. He had also realised that both of the bosses had slightly different abilities. One of them seemed utterly immune to physical attacks, but he had actually managed to damage it with a mana bolt, while the other was unfazed even when it ate one of his new spells to the face—he really needed to name the spell—yet started bleeding from the smallest scratches his parries dealt.

If before, Azbab had been exceptionally durable to both magic and physical attacks, but still suffered damage from Ronan’s more destructive examples of both, it had now split those abilities across two forms, creating an odd dichotomy that ended up being far stronger despite seemingly weaker on paper.

If it was just one of the bosses, Ronan would have no trouble taking them out eventually, given that each possessed a single crippling weakness. However, they had retained all of the first boss’ speed and strength, leaving him absolutely no room to mount a proper counter-offensive.

As he thought that they leapt from the water and shot towards him. He hadn’t gained more than a couple hundred metres of height and was in no position to escape. Instead, Ronan decided that he would go out with a bang. If he was fated to die, then he would dance around it as much as he possibly could before reaching that eventual end.

He started channeling a rainbow bomb in one hand while conjuring a blade in the other. The two bosses struck simultaneously. Ronan avoided the worst of the hit, but even their glancing blows tore into his flesh. This time, however, he fought back. The rainbow bomb flew out and smashed into the magic-weak boss, while an Ethereal Slash tore towards the physical-weak kaiju.

It was the magic-weak Azbab that was able to be marked, which meant the spell curved impossibly to strike the slippery lizard even as it avoided the rainbow bomb on its first pass. The kaleidoscopic shattering around the creature tore a dozen wounds in its torso. The other boss, having no mark to guide the slash, was able to leap over the blade, but not escape it entirely. It lost a single claw as the slash sheared through one of its six arms.

Ronan stared at the twin bosses as they made strange noises at one another. He wished he could understand them, but apparently his translation skill didn’t stretch to kaiju boss monsters. Then again, he didn’t need to understand what they were saying to know that he had thrown them off.

They were not invincible, and he realised that he might actually have a shot at taking them both down. That was when he heard a dozen simultaneous plips.

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