142 - I Need A Plan

As I continued my cat-and-mouse game with the strange dragon, a few things became increasingly apparent. First, it seemed to get more riled up as it continued to fail to catch me, which made it try harder. This meant more and more skills were revealed from its bag of tricks. Thankfully, in all this time, not a single spell seemed to be among its arsenal. The dragon was completely focused on skills, which meant every attack had a cooldown. Unfortunately for me, it seemed to have so many skills that at least one of them was always off cooldown. 

As the archive had described, a lot of them seemed to focus on body morphing, making full use of its peculiar body. I needed to be ready with a teleport at all times, since being within a certain range of its main body was a death sentence. It could shoot parts of itself like a bullet, could grow extra limbs at will, split into smaller entities, had access to a variety of ice- and water-breath skills, and sometimes abandoned its dragon form entirely to gain a massive speed boost. As the fight went on, it was all I could do to evade to the best of my ability while trying to come up with a way to actually defeat this thing. I had more or less given up on attacking for now, since all that did was waste my mana.

Second, it was blinded by rage, fully focusing on killing me. It may blame me for its displacement, which was a blessing and a curse. A curse, in that a tier twelve monster was actively hunting me down, and a blessing in that it wasn’t destroying the country proper. A failure condition for my quest was the destruction of forty percent of Lophan, which was exclusively measured by destroyed settlements, as I’ve been told. Our battleground was in the middle of a wide stretch of no man's land, and I teleported in such a way to keep the battle contained. As long as I didn’t get myself killed and kept the battle where it wasn’t a danger to the settlements, Lophan's army wouldn’t step in and fail the quest for me. 

Third, the only way for me to eke out a win was by getting in a lucky shot and destroying the dragon's core. Being lucky was kind of my thing, but it was still a long shot. I needed to somehow find a way to skew the scales in my favor, so that a lucky shot would be more likely to occur. For now, my best opportunity would be when the dragon used the skill that made it split up into smaller bodies. The core would need to be in one of the bodies, and if I could figure out in which one it was, hitting the core would become so, so much easier. 

The other way to kill it would be poison. My poison was in effect at all times, but unfortunately, I could not tell if it even did anything. It was entirely possible that its ridiculous regeneration could easily outheal what damage I did with it. There was polonic chance, which had a tiny chance to instantly kill a monster when it was inflicted with my poison, but hoping for that to happen was even more unlikely than randomly hitting the core. Still, I was keeping up a small barrage of poison spells, just in case.

In my desperation to come up with a way to kill the dragon, I even turned my eyes toward the shop. With how much time I spent on the sixth layer and copious hunting done on this one, I was literally swimming in data points. There was almost nothing to spend them on, after all. I could technically exchange a DP for one XP, but the exchange rate was atrocious enough that I didn’t even think about doing that. I hadn’t done it even once in my entire time on this planet, and not even these circumstances were enough to get me to do it. After all, even if I spent all of my DP, I would barely get a single level, which wouldn’t help at all. 

The more interesting thing was the fact that I could buy skill level ups. They were dirt cheap, even for the higher-tiered skills, with the downside being that I could only buy five levels total until I reached the next traveler tier. I was saving them up for the next and final layer so I could get the maximum value out of the purchase, just like I’d saved up to be able to buy an EX-tier passive before. I was heavily considering buying five level-ups for void rend, since gaining these levels would have a big impact on my casting speed, as well as the destructiveness of the spell. I’d also checked if there were any skills close to advancing to the next tier, but the only one within range was my poison aura spell. With just a single level left to go, I was considering buying the level to see if the next spell would help me.

After having dodged another litany of attacks from the dragon, I decided that hesitating would get me nowhere, and I bought a skill level for poison aura.

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Poison Domain (B)

Needs to be cast in conjunction with poison aura.

Expand your poison aura according to mana spent. You may freely shape or concentrate the aura. Poison Aura gains the additional effect that entities within the aura will gain further stacks of any poison debuffs over time. These instances can exceed the stack limit. Stacks start to decay at an accelerated rate once the target leaves the domain.

Cost: Variable MP/s

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Hell yeah!

I had to quickly teleport away again, since I had shifted my attention to the system notice, and the dragon had managed to catch up once again. I couldn’t help but notice that the new skill mentioned that ‘any poison debuff’ would be getting stacked beyond the usual limit. Since I inflicted both the regular poison and the deadly poison debuffs, both of them would increase! There was no mention of a limit, so could I potentially get infinite stacks if I kept my target within the domain for long enough? I took another look at the dragon charging at me, this time in its split-up form for extra speed, and immediately discarded the idea that this would be the skill that saved me. 

It would help, certainly, maybe even get me the opening I needed later, but this wasn’t some deus ex machina that would win me the battle easily. After all, the domain spell had limited range, and that meant I’d need to stay at least somewhat close to the damn thing for it to work. Sure, I could pump more mana into the spell to increase the range and effectiveness, and since it was a poison spell, I could benefit from a significant decrease in casting cost due to my passives, but if I overdid it, I would run out of mana eventually. Then again… A quick check revealed that I still had over half a million mana. 

Thanks to giant hunter boosting my attributes, my mana now reached over a million when facing higher-tiered enemies. For all intents and purposes, that was almost unlimited mana. That was, of course, disregarding the fact that I was using my MP as a second health bar due to the shield spell. Just that one hit I took earlier shaved off over 400’000 MP. The dragon was dealing stupid amounts of damage, and the shield spell subtracted triple that from my mana pool. I was reluctant to spend my mana like water, but it increasingly looked like that was what I needed to do to even stand a chance.

I needed to fully commit, go all in, spend my mana like it would never run out, and maybe, just maybe, I could eke out a win.

For now, though, I needed to experiment with my new spell for a bit. Over the next few minutes, while avoiding the dragon like the plague, I tried channeling various amounts of MP into the spell, changing the shape of the domain, and checked how much I could concentrate it while still getting good range. I eventually settled on a configuration that would burn through four hundred mana per second, which was insane, to say the least. Considering I could cast poison spells at a greatly reduced cost, doing this without the discount would be stupid. Accounting for the fact that I’d be casting a whole slew of other spells the whole time, I’d maybe be able to keep this up for about ten minutes at best.

That was, considering I didn’t get hit at any time during this whole thing.

I could almost double that time if I exclusively cast void spells to attack, but that would mean I’d have to drop grass walk and ghost walk. Both of these spells worked in tandem, just like poison aura and poison domain did, and were responsible for giving me a substantial speed boost. I wasn’t willing to give that up in this fight, but both of these spells needed MP per minute, which wasn’t too much strain. It felt almost free, even. Lava Torrent and Giant Spike were right out as well. Giant Spike wasn’t too bad a loss, since the spike always emerged from a surface, and this entire battle took place in the air, which made the spell mostly useless. Lava Torrent stung a bit, since the lingering lava could take nice chunks out of the dragon.

At best, I gave myself fifteen minutes. I watched as the dragon exploded itself, a deluge of spears forming from the body and shooting at me with incredible speed. I took a few potshots, hoping to take out the spear that contained the core, but it wasn’t meant to be. I teleported once again, but this time, I didn’t go too far. After all, I needed to be somewhat close starting now. I watched as the dragon reformed to its full glory, angrily roaring as soon as it spotted me. I took a deep breath, preparing myself for what was to come next. For the next fifteen minutes, I needed to be perfect. No mistakes allowed. A single slip-up, and I was toast. The dragon charged at me, and my domain expanded towards it. 

I couldn’t help but grin as I put my life on the line, once again.