It took them almost the entire day to clear their way to the first boss. That they were over-levelled for the encounters sped things up considerably, as did the growing familiarity with the encounters. The main enemies, in terms of difficulty, were the packs of Ohmior Knights. Whether they patrolled or guarded certain spots in the city, the animated armours were tough as groups of five. The strategy the group employed had to be slightly altered depending on the exact make-up of the packs. The weapon types were consistent, however.

In addition to those packs, there were also singular Ohmior Knights standing here and there, ghouls, and ghosts. All of those were pretty free encounters. Being careless could still lead to unnecessary deaths, but they had to try really hard to wipe against those. They were time consuming, more than anything. John wouldn’t have called them time wasting because they still gave a nice chunk of experience.

Similarly, the scenery they had to traverse was so pretty that John didn’t mind that they had to spend up to fifteen minutes between trash packs walking. From the spawn, they made their way through a cathedral; out of the cathedral, they were guided through numerous streets; and up a climb of stone platforms, they reached what seemed to be a marketplace. They fought the majority of the ghouls, and ghosts there. It seemed they were meant to simulate the deceased population of this artificial place.

What John didn’t appreciate were the stretches of the path where they had to run through a bombardment zone, dodging the distant magical cannons. Those segments, he neither got to take in the scenery nor was he rewarded with experience. If there was anything good about them, it was that they didn’t trigger a second time after he made it on the other side. Always him, annoyingly enough, otherwise he could have just had Sylph deal with every single one of those.

Beyond the market and through a barrier made out of arches, the group emerged on a large open plaza with a cobbled floor. It was confined by rectangularly placed walls, invoking a feeling between an arena and a fortress.

John knew he was inside a boss room before he got the pop-up warning him that proceeding would trigger the fight and cut off their retreat. As for what the boss was, the Gamer could easily guess that the twenty-metre-tall statue in the middle of the plaza was involved. At that moment, it had both been inert and yielded only an item description via Observe. Still, the massive tower shield and halberd it carried were too detailed and the armour too much like the paladin-esque appearance of the Ohmior Knight for John to ignore.

The group called it quits there for that day though and returned home for food, sex and rest.

John was level 342 at that point, meaning he had gotten two levels out of the trash packs. Given the level difference and the low time invested, that was a pretty good yield. If he could have, farming the Raid’s trash would have been a worthwhile consideration. With them not respawning, all the group could do on the start of the second of the ten grinding days was to get directly to the boss room.

“Gaia is a merciful goddess,” John prayed, after emerging on the other side of the teleporter that had been created on the spawning platform. The first Raid had been so small that the walk to the boss room between wipes had been negligible. The second Raid had been annoying, due to the immense amount of time lost between tries to get back to the Ravenstorm. Walking, especially through empty tracts of land, was not part of what made a Raid engaging, even a real one. Gaia had deemed it fit to address that complaint by installing a teleporter that brought them to the boss rooms. At least John assumed that it wouldn’t just stay with the first one.

“We’ll see how you think about that after we spent our whole day dying to this thing,” Salamander remarked.

“E-everybody ready?” Gnome did the final check and, once met with confirmation, the group advanced into the centre of the militaristic structure of grey and beige stone.

Exactly as John had expected, the statue came to life. Its stone surface cracked. Shards, thin in comparison to its overall size, fell off the giant form. They shattered on the pavement, a steady pattering that underlined the mighty footstep the boss took.

‘Looks like a pretty standard introductory boss,’ the Gamer took his time to think, ‘loot seems pretty average too. I mean, sure, I won’t complain about powerful weapons or raw ingredients, but the only unique thing there seems to be the blueprints. Is that a gift boss?’

In MMORPGs, it wasn’t uncommon to encounter something that was incredibly easy to kill. Traditionally, it was the first boss of a dungeon or raid and functionally acted as a gear dispenser. They existed so that even groups that barely reached the required skill floor could hope to get SOME loot out of their encounters.

The thing with that design philosophy was that it was made for games that had a weekly reset.

John was suddenly hit by an arrow. He wasn’t the only one. From every direction, energy projectiles slammed into them, striking true for most targets. Worst of all, one of them connected with Sylph, almost killing the glass-cannon of the group outright.

The Gamer made sense of the situation within a second. Along the boss, numerous Ohmior Knights had spawned on the walls of the structure. Most of them were of the bowman variety, and aimed from their position on the middle segment of the structures. On the left and right of the rectangular architecture were further elevated platforms. Additional Ohmior Knights had spawned up there.

While he analysed all of that, he also noticed stairs that, step for step, formed out of the walls. One such staircase was at the north of the wall, behind the Tower Knight. Another two were in the southern corners of the structure. The wall of arches they had stepped through into the boss arena was now completely sealed by some magical power.

“Alright, first try is always a bust,” John announced, speaking hastily. “Play defensively, focus on dodging and information gathering. Split over the staircases and scout out the kind and number of enemies. Salamander, Sylph, check if there is a ceiling on the arena and if you can reach the upper levels via air.”

“What about the boss?” Metra wanted to know, everyone looking at the Tower Knight raising his massive halberd.

“Ignore the boss!” John shouted and got running.

The statement was made purely in strategic interest. As the Observe sheet had insinuated, this was a very traditional boss design: tanky guy in the middle, ranged support adds at the sides. Specifically, this design seemed to be straight up ripped from Demon Souls. If Gaia was overly inspired, this meant that the main boss barely did anything while the adds were cleared out. If the supreme deity enacted some additional precautions, then it would be good to know what shape they took and if they could be countered otherwise.

The group split into four very uneven parts, three on the ground and the two fliers, and rushed to their designated areas. John kept tabs on the boss with the Mandala Sphere. The tip of its halberd slammed down on where they all had just been clumped up.

At first it seemed like the Tower Knight would chase after the party members heading for the northern stairs, but the moment they were up the stairs, the boss lost interest. Instead, it chased after those that still had to cross the majority of the boss room back to where they had come from and use the stairs there.

John was in that group. A sudden cut in his subconscious informed him that Sylph had been teleported out of the fight. A second arrow must have hit her. ‘Nothing unexpected there,’ he thought, heading up the stairs. He felt the thundering steps of the boss behind him. They drew closer. Then they stopped.

With no more enemies in the courtyard, the Tower Knight just stood there, waiting for something or someone.

In the meantime, John and his splinter of the party found themselves face to face with an axe-wielding Ohmior Knight. It wasn’t waiting right on top of the stairs, but it wasn’t particularly far away either. The corridor on top of the walls was only five metres wide, but they still managed to run past the enemy and proceed around the corner.

They got to continue to the first bowman of the spawned in enemies when the Mandala Sphere followed the Tower Knight turning his gargantuan weapon in his hand. The tip pointed at the group, then penetrated the nigh indestructible stone. A blast of energy rolled outwards, the purple of arcane, growing in strength as it continued on.

‘Alright, so the boss can’t be ignored,’ John thought, moments before the Arcana Strike-esque attack consumed him.

Ten attempts of trial and error passed.

The second attempt they had dedicated to finding out how that supermassive AoE worked. It would be cast every minute of the fight, they had found, no matter the situation. However, it only killed everyone if it got to pick up enough steam. Members of the party could stand inside the blast zone to soak up the initial damage, preventing the spell from rippling outwards and increasing in power. Furthermore, that initial damage was split between everyone in the area. A single person would die instantly, but five would only take a decent amount of damage between them. Where the Tower Knight had used the ability, an arcane aura would be left that dealt continuous damage to any member of the party.

The third attempt was dedicated to scouting out more of the arena and testing who the best people to stay on the base level were. The obvious choices were Aclysia, Beatrice, Metra, Undine and John, to soak up the damage. All of them had reliable ways to recover from damage taken. The problem with that line-up was that there were no tanks left to aid those who went to the upper levels, which were quickly defeated by the several Ohmior Knights they aggroed.

The fourth to seventh attempts were spent tweaking the formula, until they found something that worked. A number of discoveries were made along the way. Flying above the height of the middle level walls caused cannons beyond them to shoot at whoever was flying around, so Sylph, Salamander and the Mandala Sphere had to be careful. There seemed to be no way to give Metra space for a one on one, so she had to fight alongside them. She was best used soaking damage in this fight. A singular person, even if they died, would stop the Tower Knight’s blast from rippling out. Ohmior Knights defeated during an attempt would respawn for the next one. The Tower Knight was slow and always focused the nearest eligible target for melee attacks, throwing in the occasional arcane bolt. Both kinds of attack were clearly telegraphed.

The eighth time, they had found a group configuration that worked decently. Metra, Undine, Beatrice, John and Nia took on the Tower Knight. Aclysia acted as the tank for one group and Gnome for the other. While Aclysia was the better frontliner in terms of damage and self-sustain, Gnome, as a season elemental, did have healing abilities. What damage dealers either of those two were accompanied by was still subject to finetuning.

They still weren’t actually fighting to win, at that point.

The ninth time, they managed to fully map out the middle level of the battlefield. In total, there were 14 Ohmior Knights on that level. Two bowmen to the north, four on east and west, and one axe-wielder in each of the four corners. While that sounded like a whole lot, each of them was placed far enough apart that they could be engaged individually. Once they noticed someone on that level, they would chase them until defeated, so taking them out one by one would be the preferred strategy.

For the tenth, final, scouting pull, they forewent that strategy and just did their best to break through to the upper levels. Thanks to the flyers, they already knew that the upper levels had 3 Ohmior Knights each, the make-up being 1 bowman and 2 sword-and-shield variants. Even those were far enough apart that they could be engaged individually.