Episode 45
Title: From Now On, 1 Plus 1 Is 11
Author: [Jeoba] BaskinRobbinsPartyMember
These are the words of Honeybun, pioneer of the world of mathematics
If you cannot understand, memorize it. That is the only way for us uncivilized beings to take one step closer to the truth of this world
(Comments 78)
- 【Best Comment】To think 1 plus 1 really was 11
└ fr lol
└ fr lol
└ fr lol
└ fr lol
└ Cut it out, f;ck, you’re in an adult game copying shit only little brats do
└ fr lol
└ asdfasdfasdf you f;ckf;ckf;ckf;ck
- What the hell did these bastards eat as a group to come spouting this nonsense on the free board?
└ lol no but it’s actually true
└ fr it’s true
└ 【Best Comment】 Why 1+1 = 11 ㅡ> One of the hidden dungeon final boss mechanics makes your level 1, but if the tank pulls it with taunt, their level doesn’t become 1 or 2, it becomes 11
└ ????????????????????
└ You’ll get it if you see it yourself
└ Your level gets completely reset????
└ Nah, it comes back later
└ Ah, thank fuck;;
└ If it reset completely, it’d be totally legit to go to the game company and take a shit in the chairman’s office lololololol
└ Do game companies even have chairman’s offices?
└ Do people at game companies not shit? Why wouldn’t they have bathrooms?
└ Bro, wipe the sleep out of your eyes and look again
- 【Best Comment】 This boss... is a legend of the gaming world...
- Lololol f;ck, isn’t this mechanic fucking absurd? It resets your level, and if the tank takes all the party members’ hits too, they become level 11 instead of level 2 lololololololol
└ How do dealers handle this?? If it’s DPS-DPS, there’s no taunt
└ DPS get an evasion skill around levels 1–3, so they just dodge the AoE since it’s dodgeable
└ Whoa
- Of all the hidden dungeon mechanics, this one’s the most absurd to me... Everything except HP changes to 0 or 1 lololololol and all you have to do is strip off one piece of armor and put it back on, it’s so fucking ridiculous it’s funny
└ Strip off lmfao lolololololololololololololololol
└ Strip off lololololololololololololololololololololol
- What attempt is Retake’s group on now?
└ Wiped on attempt 12, prepping attempt 13
└ Damn
└ The trap is that they have the fewest attempts but have progressed the farthest
└ If it’s Retake, well... lol
- The mechanic order is random and the mechanics themselves are freaky, so it’s just hard to find the solutions. Once you actually break them down, the patterns are easier than low-level dungeons
└ True. If they manage the day/night phase debuffs well and solve the mechanic they’re stuck on now, they’ll probably clear right away
└ I can’t watch the stream right now because of a manager crit, can someone tell me what mechanic they’re stuck on?
└ It’s a mechanic where the boss slips a bomb into your inventory lol. When the bomb’s use-by time expires, it explodes, and when it does, it always makes your max HP 1 so you can’t survive the next AoE. They threw away 4 attempts because of this
└ Slips it in lolololol can’t you throw the bomb away???
└ Nope lololol
… (View more comments) …
―
find unused program
block_moth reboot fail. (0xc??null?)
―
It was already our thirteenth try. My focus had briefly wavered from the repeated attempts. After long tries pushing nearly fifty minutes each, we had become so used to the early phase that I could confidently say we had mastered it. But because of that, whenever we wiped and had to enter the mid-to-late phase again, we had to go through the tedious process of repetition and routine work. Just like now.
I rolled my neck once to loosen my muscles, then straightened my back and fixed my posture. Soon, the boss’s HP would drop to 50%, the phase would change, and the part where we needed to concentrate would begin. If we made a mistake here, we would suffer the misfortune of going right back to the start and repeating all of this again without even getting another look at the mechanic we hadn’t solved.
I squeezed my tired eyes shut, then opened them. At the same time, as if it had been waiting for its HP to fall to 50%, the boss clasped its hands together and began making a sphere of light. It was the day/night phase that appeared when its HP dropped below 50%. (Retake had named the phase in one go.) I mechanically pressed the keyboard while watching that light.
The boss tossed the growing light above its head, and the light flew behind the boss’s back and emitted a halo. After that, it shattered sharply into pieces, as though glass were breaking, and transformed. An ornate ornament pattern of a crescent moon holding a small circle. That pattern was the symbol of the Via tribe, and in Dusk, it represented “night.”
As soon as I confirmed the pattern, I swiftly tapped the keyboard. Usually, when a tricky mechanic appeared, we would type in chat what mechanic had come up for the sake of any party members who might get confused, but since my partner was Retake, there was no need to show that consideration. To begin with, Retake was the diligent type who would provide that sort of consideration himself.
It was just,
[Party] Honeybun: roasted
[Party] Retake: night
[Party] Retake: ./
[Party] Retake: ?
[Party] Honeybun: yum yum^^
the perfect opportunity to start a pointless wordplay.
Leaving behind Retake, who was sure to be dumbfounded, the day/night phase began.
After entering the day/night phase, the boss continuously created spheres of light through the pattern behind its back and sent them at us. These light spheres were the boss’s basic attack-level pattern. I didn’t know whether they were truly basic attacks. It was just that calling them light spheres, or spheres, didn’t roll off the tongue, so we arbitrarily decided to call them basic attacks.
In any case, the final boss’s basic attack was an area attack that exploded over a fairly wide range when it touched a player’s character, and it included either the [Scorching] or [Chill] debuff, which caused instant death when it stacked to 10.
The type of debuff changed depending on whether the phase was day or night. Now that the night phase had appeared, every time we were hit by a basic attack, the Chill debuff stacked by 1. For Retake, whose character was a Jeoba, a race said to be weak to night, it steadily stacked by 2 each time.
Light gathered at the center of the night pattern, forming a sphere the size of a fist. Then, like cells dividing, it stretched out with the chewy elasticity of glutinous rice cakes before splitting off into two spheres, which flew toward Retake and me, one each, like they were being perfectly fair.
[Combat] You used the Retreat skill. Evasion effect applied.
[Combat] Evaded ().
With the evasion skill I used right before the sphere exploded, the basic attack’s “damage” was ignored, but the Chill “debuff” attached to the basic attack was applied no matter what, so it couldn’t be resisted. Because of that, unfortunately, a blue Chill debuff appeared on one side of the screen, along with the small indicator showing 1 stack.
Even while the boss stood strangely still, staring intently into empty air, its basic attacks kept flying at us. We were dodging the basic attacks by using our evasion skills without hesitation, but because tanks and healers consumed far more stamina than the DPS lineup, there were moments when we lacked stamina and had no choice but to take the basic attacks head-on.
To make matters worse, while the basic attacks were flying in, new floor attacks carrying Scorching or Chill appeared at random. The circular sun fields and crescent-shaped moon fields were respectively attached to Scorching and Chill, and they were a mechanic that spawned haphazardly, like a child had scattered toys all over the floor.
We absolutely had to step on them. The Scorching and Chill debuffs canceled each other out.
To avoid being instantly killed when the basic attacks, which kept hitting us after the day/night phase began, reached 10 stacks, we had to find and stand on a floor field with the opposite attribute from the debuff we had. The problem was that most of the fields overlapped so much it was hard to tell how many layers there were, so if you tried to erase your stacks carelessly, you might end up refilling your lumps like the old man with a wen.
Frantically, we dodged the basic attack spheres, checked the floor to step on the fields, and recovered our HP. Unlike me, Retake’s character gained 2 stacks of Chill for every basic attack, and even after stepping on fields, he hadn’t canceled out many debuffs, so frost had settled over his body and was sparkling.
I glanced at the party list to check Retake’s debuffs and saw that he had a whopping 9 stacks of Chill, just one step away from freezing to death.
[Party] Honeybun: You must be cold
[Party] Retake: Ha
[Party] Retake: ^^
[Party] Retake: I know, right? It’s tropical nights these days
[Party] Retake: Doesn’t this game do reality patches?
[Party] Retake: It’s not always cold
[Party] Retake: just because it’s night, right?
Unlike him, he was talking a lot during a try. Looked like he was scared he might die.
In the meantime, the boss once again began casting something, flexibly waving its hands. The basic attack spheres had also stopped flying at a conveniently timed moment.
The mechanic casting time, which had always filled at an ordinary speed, was noticeably longer than before, and the boss’s HP, which had been at 44%, fell straight to 34%. The moment I saw that, I immediately knew what mechanic was coming up.
There was one mechanic that had a casting time especially long, like a raid-wipe skill, and that always shaved off exactly 10% HP. Since the skill had no name, Retake had named it the “mirror pattern.”
No sooner had I inferred the mechanic than the casting finished, and the screen briefly crackled with static. Red, yellow, green, blue, and tiny dots in colors I didn’t even manage to see blinked incessantly, irregularly encroaching upon the screen. It was the brief cutscene that marked the start of the mirror pattern.
Before long, the screen returned to normal. My character, the quick slots that had been swapped with Retake’s, and the UI I had arranged were all unchanged.
However, it wasn’t that nothing had changed at all. Retake had disappeared from my party list, leaving only an empty slot behind. It was a strange situation where the party existed but the party member did not, or even if the party member did exist, I had no way of knowing who it was.