Chapter 191
A full week passed after the first world message announced the arrival of the World Boss. It was then that a new notice went up.
[The assault of an evil dragon, steeped in death and malice down to its very marrow, is imminent. Stand against its vile hatred and horrific slaughter.]
[The World Boss Event “Revival of the Evil Dragon” is coming earlier than expected. The resurrected evil dragon is lying low as it gathers even greater power. You must stop it before it fully recovers.]
[Within the next 72 hours, a portal leading to the World Boss Raid instance dungeon “Pit Where the Evil Dragon Lies Buried” will open.]
[“The Pit Where the Evil Dragon Lies Buried” corresponds to Phase One of the World Boss Raid. Depending on the outcome of Phase One, the direction of Phase Two will change.]
After reading the announcement, Do-Jin felt a knot tighten in his chest for the first time in a while.
Can I actually pull this off?
The Venomhorn Dragon Galante wasn’t an opponent anyone could take lightly. On top of that, this wasn’t something he could handle alone. There was no way to guarantee a clean win from the start. All he could do was go all in and see it through.
Do-Jin scrubbed through the video and pulled up a still frame from footage recorded not long ago. It showed Orfen standing there, holding his hand. If nothing else, he didn’t want to fail because of those kids he’d been forced to send off without being able to do a thing for them.
I’m putting down the bastard who crawled back to life by feeding on their suffering, and I’m doing it with my own hands.
Although he had some selfish intentions, it was also for his own peace of mind. After wrapping up that thought, Do-Jin got to work on preparations.
The raid roster was already locked in. He had filled it with exactly two hundred people after running the numbers over and over, from levels to class balance. From what he remembered, the instance entry cap for the Venomhorn Dragon Galante was three hundred players. More bodies meant more scaling, though. The difficulty ramped up the more people piled in.
After weighing the standard difficulty increase against the actual power gain on their side, two hundred was the sweet spot he’d landed on. And the raid had turned out exactly the way he wanted. From the initial design phase all the way through final checks, Do-Jin handled everything himself. This was less of a team effort than a weapon he’d hammered into shape with his own hands.
But the blade is still garbage...
He’d forged good steel, but the edge was still dull.
Do-Jin stared at the papers scattered across his desk. Every scrap he could remember about Galante was scrawled out by hand. All those notes and sketches were his whetstone, and he’d hone the blade on them until it was sharp enough to take Galante’s rotten neck clean off.
***
At some point within those seventy-two hours, things finally snapped. True to the word “unstable,” Möbius treated Galante like a ticking time bomb that could go off at any moment.
That bomb detonated forty-three hours and fifty-three minutes after the final announcement dropped. Raid groups that had been sitting on standby, waiting for the World Boss to appear and the event instance dungeon to open, all surged into motion at once.
The raids came in every shape imaginable. Some were thrown together around internet streamers, loose and chaotic but loud as hell. Others were made up of high-level regular players who had quietly ground their way to the top.
Large guilds split their forces cleanly, sending in first-string elites, then second squads, then even third squads, all diving into the dungeon at the same time. They wanted as many attempts as possible within the same window, because more attempts meant more data.
It wasn’t rare to see raid teams backed by corporations or professional esports organizations, either. Compared to the last World Boss Raid, their energy seemed louder and far more desperate. People could feel the obsession, the greed, and the hunger bleeding through every movement. Money had already proven itself to be part of this equation more than once, so of course, it turned into this kind of frenzy.
Shilla jumped in right away, Do-Jin noted.
While everyone else rushed headfirst toward Galante like their asses were on fire, the raid wasn’t scheduled to assemble until two hours later. Prior to that, they’d been grinding through brutal fourteen-hour training days for several days straight, and it hadn’t even been four hours since the last session wrapped up.
Do-Jin had only just woken up, but once he heard the instance had opened, there was no way he was falling back asleep anyway. He turned on a stream instead, only to find that Shilla was already live.
—Let’s do it this time together, too. Well, your side isn’t technically a guild, but still. No matter how this World Boss Raid plays out, let’s help each other where we can.
Seeing Shilla’s guildmaster, Bari, reminded Do-Jin of the message she had sent him earlier. He had already replied that he was on board. Whether cooperation was immediately necessary or not, there was no downside to keeping that relationship clean and friendly.
When Shilla finally made contact with Galante and the fight began, Do-Jin focused up.
***
The opening clash of Shilla Guild’s first raid group began.
The moment Bari loosed her arrow, silence crushed the battlefield, and a single gleaming arrow cut through it before slamming straight into the snout of the motionless dragon.
“KUUUUOOOOOO!”
The five-horned dragon lurched upright and unleashed a roar that sounded like hell itself coughing up blood, like rusted steel being twisted apart inside its throat. The noise scraped across everyone’s skulls hard enough to make their teeth ache.
“Ugh...!”
Melee dealers with weaker resistance started staggering immediately. A few of them lost control of their bodies and swung their weapons at teammates like puppets with the strings cut.
“It’s Fear and Confusion!”
Shilla’s healers snapped into motion fast enough to keep things from spiraling into complete chaos. Even so, the Roar was just the dragon clearing its throat. The real nightmare kicked off after that.
This thing was a monster stitched together from a dead dragon’s corpse, refined human suffering, and weaponized malice. It fought with every intention to slaughter everyone in its path.
“Tanks, move up!”
Ten tanks stepped forward together and locked into position. Galante’s attention snapped to them in an instant.
“KUUUUGH!”
The Venomhorn Dragon moved like a walking biohazard. No thought lived behind its eyes, and no restraint remained in its body. Hatred drove it, and murder finished the job. Its tail, lined with jagged, spike-like scales, slammed straight toward the tank wall.
Boom!
The impact shoved the entire formation back several meters in one violent hit. The tanks could barely hold on.
“Watch out!” someone yelled.
Just as relief was about to set in, a tank screamed at the horror that flashed before his eyes. He saw dark red liquid bulging between the densely packed black scales, ready to burst at any second. A pressurized spray then blasted outward at high velocity. The tanks had no time to react, and the mist-like particles spread instantly, poisoning everyone they touched.
“Detox! Someone fucking use Detox, now!”
“It won’t cleanse!”
“This debuff doesn’t cleanse? What kind of fucked-up bullshit is this?!”
Tank health bars started dropping like rocks, and panic tore through the raid.
“Stay calm! Keep hitting it! Watch its movement and don’t take your eyes off it!”
Bari barely finished shouting before Galante moved again.
For half a second, the dragon seemed to move in slow motion. Then it snapped forward as if the game had stuttered and suddenly caught up. Galante whipped its massive body around and shredded everything nearby. Its entire frame was a weapon. Even a glancing touch was enough to get someone killed on the spot.
“Aaagh!”
Screams erupted as players started dropping left and right with catastrophic injuries. As Galante spun again, more Poison Mist rolled across the field and swallowed everything.
“Fuck this shit! What kind of deranged asshole designs a boss like this and thinks it’s acceptable?”
The fact that the raid was being streamed live stopped mattering to anyone, since nobody had come in expecting a one-try clear. Everyone knew from the start that this was supposed to be a scouting run, but even then, there was a limit to how unfair it could be.
“What, does this thing think it’s a goddamn Beyblade?”
The monster was so absurdly broken that the melee DPS couldn’t even get close. Just as the players were thinking the ranged should be taking over for damage, Galante silently hunched its body.
“Huh?”
It folded its wings and charged straight through the air. It spun its body like a drill and tore into the ranged DPS positioned at the rear of the raid. As if that wasn’t enough, it followed up with the same rotation pattern it had shown before.
Then, a collective scream of agony echoed across the battlefield.
└ .....?
└ What the fuck is that thing? Why is the dragon moving like that? Is that a cat or something?
└ Nah seriously, it moves like a goddamn feline. Why is it so fucking fast?
└ Every time it moves, it sprays poison. That’s actually insane.
└ Holy shit, Möbius really are a bunch of unhinged motherfuckers. They’re at it again with another bullshit boss lmao.
Viewers watching the stream clicked their tongues at Galante’s grotesque, sadistic attack patterns that kicked off the fight.
└ How are the other streams looking? Anyone got multiple POVs up?
└ I’ve got a few American streams open. Two of them are already wiped, lol.
└ They’re already wiped? Fuck me. I see the attack patterns are fucked, but that fast?
└ Guess they got turbo-unlucky. It looked like a hell of a combo back-to-back.
While the viewers were busy laughing at the players’ expense, Galante suddenly took to the air.
└ THERE IT IS. THAT’S THE ONE.
The dragon snapped its jaws open and began charging a breath attack. Before anyone could even think about how to deal with it, Galante tore through the sky at full speed and scraped the ground below with Poison Breath, like it was pressure-washing the battlefield with pure death.
The breath carved a jagged zigzag across the field, and dozens of Shilla Guild members either dropped dead on the spot or took crippling damage and were forced straight out of the fight.
For something that massive, the speed was completely unbelievable. Between the absurd mobility, attack patterns that were near impossible to approach, and a non-cleansable debuff, Galante’s combat power went way past hard and into “go-to-hell” territory.
In just a few minutes, the dragon made its point painfully clear.
└ Holy shit, I guess nobody gets to whine about this being high-level-only content anymore. I don’t even wanna touch this garbage.
└ For real. Even without a death penalty, I’m not bashing my head against an unkillable boss like a dumbass.
└ Yep, that’s a wipe. I’m out. Switching streams.
└ Same. Watching other people suffer while I get to eat fried chicken and crush beers is the correct life choice.
└ Wait, isn’t that other raid starting yet? Why’s their stream still dead?
└ Which raid?
└ Do-Jin’s, dumbass. Don’t act like you don’t know.
└ Ohhh. He’s probably just sitting there watching everyone else get slaughtered first, LOL.
After Galante finished turning Shilla’s raid into a pile of corpses, the chat’s attention shifted immediately to the one stream that still hadn’t gone live.
└ So he’s just letting other raids eat shit while he farms intel like a pussy? Lol
└ Pussy my ass, lmao. The second Do-Jin goes live, every other stream is gonna be spying on him anyway.
└ But seriously, how the fuck does this end? Pro teams are going balls-deep right now, even squads stacked with former esports players.
└ You’re asking who’s clearing it first?
└ Yeah. Do you think Do-Jin will still pull another first clear?
└ Yeah, nah. Nobody’s clearing this shit, lol. They told us in the announcement. There are two phases for the World Boss. Phase One’s tuned to be fucking impossible on purpose, so everyone just gets wiped for clips and content. Then Phase Two will drop, the devs will nerf it, and that’s when you’ll finally be allowed to kill it.
└ WAIT, HOLD ON. STREAM’S UP.
└ WHAT.
└ HOLY SHIT IT IS, BLACK SCREEN’S UP.
The viewer count on Shilla’s stream dropped off a cliff. The same thing happened everywhere else. Whether it was pro teams, massive guilds, or random tryhard squads, none of it mattered.
Anyone who had been watching for strategy bailed instantly and flooded Do-Jin’s channel like starving animals. The black waiting screen slowly brightened, and a voice finally came through.
“Make sure you grabbed everything you were given. Today isn’t about heroics. Focus on reading the patterns, burning them into your bodies, and stacking the info and experience needed to lock down a real strategy,” Do-Jin said as he began his raid on the Venomhorn Dragon, Galante.