Chapter 192
The training over the past few days hammered one miserable rule into everyone’s heads. The instant something happened, they had to react or die. No one had time to spoon-feed detailed strategy notes before Galante showed its ugly face. That meant Do-Jin’s raid had to walk into the first encounter blind and eat whatever attacks came with it.
The opening clash delivered exactly what reality promised: absolutely no information. Galante moved too fast and hit like a truck packed with bad intentions, so being able to adapt on the spot wasn’t realistic.
└ Wow, I expected more than this shit. This looks exactly the same as everyone else.
└ Seriously... I thought Do-Jin would just delete it and move on.
Viewers watched the raid get shredded from the opening seconds and swept straight off the field. The chat filled with disappointment almost immediately.
└ Anyone crying right now needs their brain checked. Who the fuck clears a monster like that on the first pull?
└ Yeah, no shit. That thing was never designed for first sight clears. Stop huffing copium, dumbasses.
Plenty of people understood that this mess made perfect sense. The real issue was that Do-Jin had stacked expectations so high over time that people forgot what failure even looked like. When reality finally slapped them, it didn’t hold back. Do-Jin didn’t have the luxury to care about that noise.
“All right. We start by spreading the tank line. When a big hit comes, three people group up and deal with it. DPS, keep your distance so you don’t all get wiped in one sweep. Healers, keep heal-over-time buffs only on the DPS. Ignore everything except poison damage.”
After the first completely worthless wipe, one of the raiders raised a hand and spoke up. “Even normal attacks put us straight into critical if we get clipped. Can we really survive with just heal-over-time?”
Do-Jin answered without missing a beat, “Then don’t get hit. DPS shouldn’t get hit at all. If this fight drags on, two hundred people will bleed at the same time. Just keeping that stable will already be a nightmare. If one or two idiots eat a pattern and their health drops off a cliff, healers will dump resources to save them. Once that starts, healing leaks everywhere, the raid starts wobbling like shit on ice, and the whole thing collapses. You all know how that ends.”
The DPS players went stiff. No one could brush off the idea of not getting hit even once.
“Healers are in the same hell. DPS will slow down when they focus on dodging. The fight will drag on. During that time, healers will get fucked the most, trying to cover constant health loss. No one’s allowed to drop out.”
What Do-Jin was really saying wasn’t subtle at all. This simple plan only worked if nobody died. The raid members all stared at him uncomfortably with one thought in their minds.
Is that even possible when one hit kills almost instantaneously?
“You’ll make it work. You’ll manage. Möbius shoved this out as an instance dungeon so you can keep slamming into it without worrying about death penalties, assuming those assholes have even a shred of conscience left.”
Conscience was a funny word to throw around. People outside were already losing their minds, screaming that Möbius’s conscience had been dead for years. Still, nobody in the raid opened their mouth. Running their mouths wasn’t going to magically fix the situation, and they all knew it.
“Poison resistance potions and regen potions will be ready soon,” Do-Jin added. “Until then, we just keep bashing our heads against it a few more times.”
The attempts kept rolling, and one brutal wipe came after the other. Every time a pattern showed its face, Do-Jin’s call came right on its heels.
“Spread out. Spread the fuck out! If it goes airborne, clear the front no matter what.”
Even so, Galante wasn’t the kind of bastard who waited politely for instructions to sink in. If someone heard the call and then reacted, that person either died on the spot or got wrecked badly enough to be useless for the rest of the fight.
“All right. Except for surprise patterns, tanks block everything. Healers, shift three more of you over to tank healing.”
Do-Jin kept shaving the strategy down as the fight went on. He cut, adjusted, and tightened the build over and over, tossing out anything that wasted time or got people killed. That repetition slowly paid off, and the raid started to build something that looked like real baseline competence against Galante, even if it was earned the hard way.
Once things reached that point, Do-Jin handed out special assignments to Theresa and Tanto, the two carrying relics. Theresa got the job of physically intercepting the sudden charge patterns with her own body, even if it meant getting smashed for it. Tanto got the worse job. He had to force his way into awkward, hard-to-target spots and keep stacking damage where Galante least wanted it, no matter how ugly it got.
Just then, the viewers sensed something was off.
└ This is weird as hell. They aren’t really doing anything different, but somehow, this side keeps inching ahead.
└ Yeah, it’s strange. Everyone’s copying and monitoring each other, so the approaches all look the same, but Do-Jin’s side always feels one step ahead.
Do-Jin fed the raid the most efficient answers he had stored away, and he did it quietly enough that it barely showed. He slipped his knowledge in just under the radar, nudging people toward the right moves without making it obvious. Thanks to that, their progress kept coming out clean and steady instead of stalling out like the others.
In the end, Do-Jin became the first among all the raids to reach the phase he remembered, Galante’s final phase, known as Berserk. That was where they hit the real wall. The gaps between patterns shrank even further. From the wind-up to the actual strike, everything sped up by at least one and a half times. Holding out without taking damage became nearly impossible.
After countless attempts, the system announced the end of Phase One of the World Boss Raid event.
[The portal leading to “The Pit Where the Evil Dragon Lies Buried” will close in 72 hours.]
└ Yeah, figures. They tuned this shit so you just can’t kill it.
└ Honestly, without Do-Jin, we probably wouldn’t have even seen Berserk.
└ Let’s be real. Most of the actual strategy came out of Do-Jin’s party anyway.
└ This already counts as a victory for humanity, fr.
Most people had already decided that Phase One of the event was basically over right here.
However, Do-Jin didn’t agree with that sentiment at all. Even as the announced deadline crept closer, even when it was practically the last try that mattered, he refused to quit.
“Tanto, this is pretty much the last real attempt,” Do-Jin said. “I’m changing the plan.”
“What?” Tanto replied. “How exactly?”
“You remember the spot I’ve been telling you to hit this whole time?”
“You mean the big scale on the dragon’s chest?”
“When Galante starts going Berserk, you rush in and rip that thing off,” Do-Jin said flatly. “Don’t worry about surviving.”
Up until that point, Do-Jin had treated the raid’s survival as the top priority. Keeping everyone alive had been the rule carved into stone. Now there wasn’t time left for that kind of tiptoeing. For the first time, Do-Jin gave an order he had never issued before.
“Everyone will survive until Berserk. Once Galante speeds up, you spread out as much as possible and just deal damage. Healers will deal damage too. That thing’s undead, so damage sticks like crazy. Shove everything you have into its chest. Once you’re done, you can die.”
The moment Do-Jin told them to forget about living and go all in, the raid members’ expressions actually brightened. Up until now, they had spent the whole fight running for their lives like cowards, trying not to get erased. Now they were being told they could slam in one clean, heavy hit and go out in a blaze instead.
“All right,” Do-Jin said. “This is the final run.”
With twenty minutes left before the instance dungeon closed, the last attempt began.
The two hundred raiders, now completely drilled on every pre-Berserk pattern, moved like machines. They erased poison damage with heal-over-time effects and automatic recovery potions. They read Galante’s next move from the tiniest twitch and slipped in and out cleanly, like the whole thing was a rehearsed scene.
Not a single person opened their mouth during that stretch, and that included Do-Jin. They had grown enough to handle everything without orders. The silence said more than any command ever could.
“It’s going Berserk!”
Galante’s black scales flushed a dark crimson as its health dropped past a certain point. The raid called it Berserk for convenience, but in reality, it was just a ridiculous power-up that screamed death for the entire raid.
The air itself shifted, and it wasn’t only because Galante changed. Something heavier pressed down on everyone. A mountain no one had ever climbed stood in front of them again, and everyone knew this was the last chance they were ever getting to try. That realization cranked the players’ desperation straight through the roof.
“Tanto!”
Do-Jin shouted, but the call was already pointless. Tanto had closed the distance to Galante thanks to his stealth ability. A sharp scraping sound rang out as he burst into view from the dragon’s chest.
“Ghk.”
The poison mist thickened the instant Berserk kicked in, nastier and meaner than before. Tanto’s health plummeted like it had been kicked off a cliff. Normally, he would have pulled back and played it safe, but that kind of survival instinct was worthless right now.
“Huup.”
Tanto forced more strength into the swing, drove his axe in like a dagger, and jammed it between the scales. He followed through with everything he had left, ripping into the gap between rotten flesh and scale.
Please...
The relic option on Tanto’s axe, known as Vital Point Attack, triggered at the worst and best possible moment. The massive scale lodged dead center on Galante’s chest tore free. At the same time, Tanto’s health hit zero. With all of his resistances stripped away after death, his body collapsed and liquefied on the spot, melting into the ground. That brutal send-off sent the raid into a frenzy.
“Our rogue’s dead!”
“That was a straight-up fucking kamikaze!!”
Any concern for survival vanished instantly. Magic, arrows, swords, and spears all flew toward the dragon’s most obvious weak point, the center of its chest. No one bothered dodging anymore. Getting hit once or twice didn’t matter when they knew the next attack would kill them anyway. One more hit mattered more than staying alive.
That mindset drove the death count through the roof. Five got erased by the tail. Ten players vanished in an aerial charge. Another five disappeared into the spinning pattern like they were never there to begin with. The raid’s numbers dropped at a terrifying pace.
Shit. There’s no way this is how it really ends.
Do-Jin fired spell after spell, and panic crept in as the headcount kept shrinking. The Galante in here and the Galante outside were not even the same monster. Outside this place, its body would swell to a completely different scale, and it would fully reclaim the form it had when it was alive.
I have to end this here. Somehow.
Do-Jin poured everything he had into one more Fireball and slammed it into the exposed chest. That was when he noticed something odd about Galante’s mana flow. It wasn’t the kind of natural mana that leaked from a powerful being. It looked closer to blood spraying from an open wound, as if raw mana was spilling out of something torn from the inside.
Do-Jin pulled his viewpoint forward by activating Farsight. What he saw made it clear immediately. The mana wasn’t coming from the scale they’d just ripped off. It was pouring out from the scale beneath it.
There’s a wound under there.
The scale closest to the heart was already gone, but the spot he was seeing now sat just as close. Galante had died once and ended up buried here for a reason. Which meant only one thing.
It took a lethal wound when it died.
Something had slipped through the gaps between the scales and reached all the way to the heart. By then, fewer than half the raid members were still standing. There wasn’t time left to keep thinking this through.
“Hey! Where are you going, Do-Jin?”
From the rear line, Do-Jin suddenly launched himself toward Galante at a ridiculous speed. After reaching Tier 6, Psychokinetic Artistry had climbed with him, and he pushed it without sparing a single thought for the strain on his body. Extreme psychokinetic reinforcement wrapped around him and hurled him forward in a brutal burst.
“GRAAAAH.”
Galante’s front claw tore through the air toward him, but Do-Jin had already read the movement and slipped past it cleanly.
From this distance and this angle, there’s only one move.
After missing its strike, Galante stalled for a brief instant. Then, the spinning pattern kicked in. Blade-like scales ripped outward in every direction, a difficult attack that guaranteed massive damage to anything caught inside it.
Do-Jin didn’t back off. He drove Lightning Sword straight into the exposed spot, then immediately followed with Giant’s Hammer, a spell that boasted nothing but brute force. When it crashed down, the impact was strong enough to rattle bones. His Lightning Sword detonated immediately after. The combined blast of mana and raw physical force ripped another scale free from Galante’s body. Between the dangling strips of rotten flesh, a grotesque wound split open, ugly and unmistakable.
Before Do-Jin could capitalize on it, Galante spun. Razor-sharp scales tore through his entire body in a violent screech. Even wrapped in Psychokinesis, Do-Jin’s health vanished in massive chunks.
“No!” Theresa rushed forward too late, and there was nothing she could do.
The shield’s effect was already spent, and the area attack had swallowed him completely. In that instant, Do-Jin’s death felt unavoidable, like a natural consequence finally catching up. However, he hadn’t charged in to kill himself.
Now!
The instant his health crashed and scraped against zero, with timing so tight it felt like a single second had been sliced into pieces, Do-Jin triggered Limited Reversion and rewound his own time. The life that had nearly vanished snapped back into place. Galante’s spin kept going for a moment longer, but this time it only chewed through half his health. The Magic Circuits that had overloaded from forcing out two Tier 6 spells steadied at once.
In that moment frozen in time, Do-Jin’s Magic Circuits began to glow with a new kind of light. Seeing this, one of the chatters, clearly riding an adrenaline high, immediately rattled out a comment.
└ Fukign isane...