CC 9: Tenacity ~ Two

“Hey! This is only supposed to bring across the building, what's with the lava?”

Joe's startled outburst at the incoherent scene caused a visible ripple of unease to spread across the faces of those participating in his magic. For a moment, the uncomfortable silence hung in the air, like an awkwardly failed bardic spell. Thankfully, in a fleeting moment of self-awareness, Joe realized that literally shouting his own ignorance for all to hear was a great way to erode people's trust in his mystical prowess.

Forcibly shifting his facial expression to understanding and determination, Joe slathered a smile on his face and summoned the power of… deception! “Right, right! The pyramid uses lava as an energy source of some kind, this is what’s required for it to function on this planet. Makes perfect sense!”

His loud musing caused the participants to breathe out a sigh of relief as the liquid stone continued to pour out of the sky and onto the frozen land below. Joe watched as it sank through the top layers of what he had originally assumed was soil, now revealed as a slurry of snow and dirt. On one hand, that was useful knowledge. On the other, it made Joe realize that they were going to have to clear a monumental amount of snow from the area if they wanted to have firm foundations for their buildings. “Good thing we have shovel guy. Heh. Digs snow. I shoulda got his name.”

The Ritualist went silent as his eyes drank in the sight of the inverted tip of the Pyramid of Panacea. Strangely enough, where the building would touch the ground was a drill, instead of the last bit of a sharp triangle. It was clearly a built-in part of the structure, but he couldn’t remember seeing it back when it had first been created. Joe tried to make sense of it, trying to remember if it had been on the original blueprint, but quickly decided that he hadn’t noticed the oddity because the building had been created in a single fell swoop.

The enormous building was lowering out of the sky, instead of disintegrating and being recreated on this world. That in and of itself was different than what Joe had expected, but could easily be explained by the quality of the building itself.

Another protuberance which was far more distressing caught his attention.

A situation that could not be explained was the enormous talons digging directly through the stone of the pyramid, attached to something that was fighting against the pull of the ritual in an attempt to yank the structure back through the portal.

“Celestial feces, the World Boss is still holding onto it!” Havoc bellowed as the fight between the two powers began to affect the world around them. As colossal friction saturated the sky around the rent in space, bolts of lightning began to dance and crackle. Seemingly endless flows of molten lava spilling from the portal clashed with the icy expanse of the frozen realm; the opposing forces caused an eerie symphony of searing heat-haze and ethereal steam patterns that swirled and melded—reducing visibility to only a few dozen feet at a time.

Then the superheated lava met the shockingly cold air, directly generating air explosions from the sudden change in air pressure, which blasted the mists into vapor that quickly fell to the ground as snow as it went past the boundary of its heat source.

“Increasing the mana draw!” Joe shouted the warning to all of the participants, working on the ritual to actively control how much power was being invested. A resounding grumble rose up from the multitude of Dwarves, a trumpet call of effort that heralded the masterful feat of magic as the grand edifice began a slow, yet steady descent toward Jotunheim.

The unmistakable displeasure of the World Boss manifested itself as another avian limb emerging from the hole in space, its colossal talons ruthlessly piercing through the glassy surface of the building as though it was made of cardboard. The air resonated with a cacophony of stone flash-freezing into ice-coated obsidian formations, the sound like stone crumbling and glass shattering as more and more lava shifted into a solid state. Even the wind picked up, as though the icy world itself was fighting against any increase of the ambient temperature.

Glancing to the side, Joe could see that Jake was staring at the interplay with furious eyes, growling low in his throat as he started tossing alchemical reagents into the air. Then he began mumbling under his breath, and tracing patterns of mana into the somehow-hovering powders.

Perfectly happy to allow other people to deal with the monster, Joe focused on his own task of bringing the building through and into position. His enormous amount of practice controlling mana and aspects was useful here, as the building shook side to side from the wrenching forces. In his mind's eye, he held the image of the pyramid’s final resting place, and worked to bring the base of the establishment into alignment with the ritual circle.

Each time it got close to the edge of the spinning magic, the friction in the air multiplied tenfold, sending thick bolts of lightning careening into the world. Most of that energy struck the immaterial edges of the ritual itself, either being absorbed or dissipated thanks to the protections that were built into the Master-rank ritual.

What did get through didn't impact people; instead it disrupted the stability of the ritual ever so slightly, causing Joe's mental fatigue to rapidly accumulate. Enormous spell effects—coming off of mages and the assemblage of Masters and Grandmasters—begin rocketing into the scaly limbs of the World Boss, aimed extremely precisely so as to counter its swaying movements. While Joe correctly assumed that there weren't many weak points that could be targeted, he was certain getting a caboose-sized nail driven into a leg by a summoned entity couldn’t feel nice. “Almost… to the ground… hold on!”

The Reductionist puppeted the strands of power that were wrapped around the mountainous facility, orchestrating the movement until the moment that the building finally firmly settled onto the ground. He heaved a sigh of relief, only to have additional power ripped out of him in the next moment. Contrary to his expectations, the portal above them wasn't snapping closed. Instead, it seemed that the World Boss itself was slowly being pulled through, and onto Jotunheim.

His eyes went wide as he finally realized where the ritual had gone wrong. “It's connected to the building! Break its grip, or we're going to have to deal with a furious World Boss on day one!”

They had no protections, no buffs scaled up to cover the entire remaining Dwarven populace. If the World Boss came through, they likely had no chance of survival. Thousands of combatants got involved, their weapons reaching out to nick tiny paper cuts into the legs and now-visible body of the thrashing World Boss.

As the damage began to accumulate, eventually reaching one percent of the overall health of the monster, it stopped struggling to pull itself and the building back to the previous world—instead choosing to force itself the rest of the way through to Jotunheim. Joe and the rest of the participants in the ritual were knocked to their knees, or backs, as the ritual completed and the remaining power in the air dissipated in a small shockwave. The human forced himself to his feet immediately thanks to his ‘Immovable Object’ title granting him an eighty percent knockback resistance, gasping for air as he tried to get his bearings.

*Skreeee!*

His eyes traveled up, higher and higher until they took in the majesty of the World Boss. Joe was looking at a Phoenix made entirely of stone and lava. It could have been his imagination, but it appeared that it was staring directly back at him. “Pretty, and terrifying. Pretty terrifying. Run!”

Dwarves scattered in all directions as the bird flapped its wings a single time, catapulting a volcano's worth of lava in the air that spread out in a nova of light and molten stone, before slowly cascading toward the ground like a blanket flung wide open. It landed on the ground, but also on people—who were instantly lit on fire. It clung to their bodies like napalm, dealing a surprisingly low amount of impact damage in favor of burning them over the next several minutes.

Here the terrain worked in their favor, as many people were able to drop to the ground and sink into the frozen surface, turning the spot they landed into a miniature ice bath. The lava was rapidly quenched, although this forced them to deal with a secondary issue: as the molten stone cooled, it hardened. Many of the people that had dove to the ground found themselves trapped in a solid-stone coffin, unable to escape. Joe assumed that had something to do with the material being created by such a powerful monster, as almost everyone impacted should have been able to smash their way out of such a thin layer of otherwise-still-pliable obsidian.

Joe simply ignored the attack, letting it wash over his Exquisite Shell and fall to the ground around him. He kept his eyes on the creature, one of the few people who did, and noticed something that troubled him greatly. The enormous Lava Phoenix was lifting its feet and slamming them into the building it was perched on, causing it to crumble with every strike. “If that building is permanently destroyed… me too, probably.”

Damage taken: 0! Debuff failed to take hold!

“Nice.” Instead of pursuing the safe, likely intelligent choice of running for his life, Joe ran instead to the side of the safely-landed pyramid. He had a few tools in his codpiece that he hoped would be enough to salvage the situation, and he needed to get them in place. As he got to the easternmost point of the structure, he dropped a lovely little obelisk that had been inscribed with the Ritual of Repair. Grabbing a random Dwarf, he shoved the unfortunate to the side of the plinth and told her how to use it. Joe activated the ritual, plopped the Dwarves hands in place, and ordered her act as a battery. “Sorry about the short notice!”

“Is that a Dwarf joke?” She yelled back at him, unable to hunt him down as Joe ran along the building once more, dropping yet another stone at the northmost point of the building and this time grabbed a passing human.

He repeated this twice more, controlling the final Ritual of Repair on his own as the Phoenix screamed in fury. Each time it lifted a foot, the stonework and crystal of the pyramid flowed back together seamlessly, repairing the damage at a rate that was slightly higher than what the World Boss could output. Joe knew this, as he was carefully watching the durability increase, then rapidly drop.

Pharaoh's Pyramid of Panacea: 110,354/1,000,000 durability.

“Staying above ten percent. We can do this!” Joe's enthusiasm cut off a moment later as the Phoenix head switched to the side and its gaze seemed to bore into the human on the north side of the building that was determinedly keeping the ritual active. The bird's beak opened, and a burning ring of fire went down, down, down and settled around the human and block of stone he was feeding mana into. Joe wasn't able to see exactly what happened, being on the other side of the structure, but from the cut-off scream… he assumed it was nothing good.

Once more a talon went up, then came down and crashed into the building. This time, Joe saw that it was being repaired at a rate slightly slower than the damage was accumulating. He tried not to let it dampen his enthusiasm too much. “Maybe we can do this!”

The World Boss targeted another of the rituals, only for an enormous finger to poke out of the air next to it at that moment, impacting the side of the creature's head and sending the entire creature shifting and tumbling to the side. There was a clap of thunder from the point of impact, which shook the air hard enough that Joe was knocked away from his ritual and sent toosh over teakettle. When he managed to catch himself, Joe hurled himself forward, reactivating the ritual as quickly as possible. “Abyss, if I was knocked away with all of my bonuses to remaining steady, ten gold says the others have been sent flying.”

Joe recognized that finger: it was the same summon that Jake had used as a warning attack against Havoc when they first were introduced to each other, only scaled up to a size that was on par with the World Boss itself. He could only hope that the hidden powerhouse had an entire arm up his sleeve, because as the bird fell, it kept its grip on the building and started flailing around to get back up. Frankly, Joe couldn't even tell if the beast was injured from the blow.

The Ritualist gasped as he noticed that the structural durability had started ticking down as though it was an altimeter in a helicopter that had just been hit by a rocket propelled grenade. “Go, ritual! Fix, fix, fix!”

As the Phoenix flapped its wings again, it ripped its feet out of the Pyramid and sent off another wave of lava splattering out as it lifted itself into the air. It screeched its fury, then its eyes seemed to follow the connection of power between Joe, the ritual, and the building that his ritual was repairing. Flapping hard and screeching its displeasure, it spiraled in the air, sending liquid stone spinning far enough into the distance to light up the visible skyline. The Phoenix reached hundreds of feet above the ground in an instant… before diving at him with deadly intent. Joe watched his death approach, calm in the knowledge that he would be able to respawn soon.

Then the World Boss imploded, sending stone, lava, and fiery feathers geysering in all directions as though two meteors had struck each other in space.

Congratulations! You have defeated a World Boss!

Joe stood in stunned silence as chunks of the literally-strongest creature in a world landed around him. Notifications were popping up, each one louder than the previous, demanding his attention. But the one at the very top caught his eye more than any of the others.

As the World Boss was defeated through your actions, which dealt more than 95% of its total Health, its Core has been directly added to your storage device. No one else has received a message detailing this fact. Since the World Boss was defeated using a system bug, no experience is awarded. No other World Boss may be defeated in this manner.