Rune Seeker

At his words, both Nivian and Ilrolik glanced in his direction. They weren’t part of the Party Interface, but his voice had to have almost been in their ears.

“Hiral?” Nivian asked, quickly turning back to block another titanic blow from the primordial hammer. “You’ve got a plan?”

“I do,” Hiral said. “Each of the three Wild-Boss Uniclops has a buff. Or, more specifically the trees on their backs, but they’re just as protected as the rest.”

“What are the buffs?” Ilrolik asked at the same time she activated her Focused Rage tattoo again, pulling the axe-clops’s attention to her.

“Three different kinds of invulnerability,” Hiral said. “But the buffs only work on the other two Uniclops, not the one giving it. Physical invulnerability. Magic or elemental invulnerability – I’m not sure which. And the third seems like some kind of immunity to debuffs.”

“That’s pretty overpowered,” Yanily said, continuing his barrage on the staff-clops as he danced around in the air.

“Until we kill one of them,” Seena said, figuring out Hiral’s thinking. “What’s our first target?”

“The one giving the physical invulnerability,” Hiral said. “The one with the axe.”

“Ours?” Ilrolik asked. “Is that…?”

“Yes,” Hiral interrupted. “Romin, can you change your Don’t Look at Me! to move threat to Ilrolik? She’s going to need the help if we’re focusing on that giant.”

“I can,” Romin said. “But what about Wallop?”

“He’ll be able to handle the threat on his own.”

A side-eye from the Rune-o in Hiral’s direction promised the companion would do just that.

“Nivian and Wallop, keep tanking your targets,” Hiral started giving instructions. “Gran, think you can heal both of them?”

“Nivian hardly takes any damage at all,” Gran said. “Yeah, that’s right, he avoids getting hit. Unlike somebody.” The vampire’s words made the Rune-o flinch far more than any of the spiked roots slamming into his heavy armor did.

“Politet and Drahn need to attack the staff-clops. Debuffs only, so Pollen Poison and whatever gas or acid Politet uses. Preferably one that won’t kill any nearby Breathers accidently.”

“Understood,” Nivian said.

“Anybody with a focus on physical damage, switch targets to the axe-clops,” Hiral continued. “Seena, you can start attacking Nivian’s hammer-clops, but your Lingering Flames won’t stick until we kill the staff-clops, which will actually be our last target.”

“How hard am I hitting it?” his party leader asked.

“Just start whittling it down. Don’t do anything big enough it’ll lose interest in Nivian.”

“I’ll keep it’s attention,” Nivian said. “She can do her thing.”

“I don’t think you know quite how big her thing is these days,” Hiral told the tank. “Steady damage,” he told Seena again.

“Got it,” she replied.

“Ilrolik, Sera should move to debuffing the staff-clops as well. It’ll be more cost effective. Everybody ready?”

“Who should I put the other half of Don’t Look at Me! on?” Romin asked.

Hiral’s gut reaction was to say Yanily, but a big part of his damage was lightning. Elemental. Meaning he’d lose a lot of it. Hiral or Right were his next logical choices – he knew what they could do – but a look at Nivian’s group gave him what may be an even better answer. This was the whole point of having a raid group after all – different strengths. In this case, literally.

“Put it on Bash,” Hiral said. “Nivian, does the little guy have any big cooldowns?”

“Troblin Wrath,” Nivian said. “Kind of like Enraged, but it’s all into strength. A lot of it.”

“Get him to use it and go wild on axe-clops,” Hiral said. “That’s it. That’s the plan. Smash axe-clops down, then we’ll move to hammer-clops, and finally to the staff-clops.”

With the instructions given, Hiral let the claws of Separation fade from his fingers. Then, from the Arsenal of Amin Thett, Hiral withdrew the bulky Weight of Tomorrow. The hammer settled in his hands, his fingers wrapping around the sliding controls. Steam jetted out of the massive, draconic head, gravity taking hold of it before Hiral wrapped his own threads of Gravity to somewhat offset it.

If there was ever a weapon to do pure, physical damage, this was the one.

In that second of preparation, the others had already begun to make their moves, with a powerful wave of energy erupting off Bash. Unlike the pillars of energy that reached for the sky when Hiral or the others used Eloquently Enraged+, Bash’s energy rolled outward in a circle around him. Grass flattened in an instant, with Nivian and the hammer-clops were forced to brace against the outpouring of energy.

Even after it rolled past the Death Knight tank – fifty feet from the small Troblin – Nivian’s skeletal support didn’t vanish. And Hiral found out why another second later, with the expanding wave suddenly getting sucked back in like it was a vacuum. Which may’ve been exactly what it was. Everything it passed – correction, everything living it passed – grew a little greyer, and Hiral’s Cycling senses picked up more wisps of solar energy getting sucked back along with the retreating wave.

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The hammer-clops staggered under the force, its lack of immunity to energy making it vulnerable to whatever Bash was doing, before the wave fully returned the to the Troblin. In an instant, a second pulse of power shook the area. This one didn’t come with a shockwave or dramatic pillar, but instead thumped like the beat of a massive heart. Even then, it wasn’t purely sound. It rolled through the same folds in reality where the PIMP seemed to hide, shaking energy loose to filter back towards the Troblin.

A Troblin who looked quite different than he had a second before. Bands of green glowed along his body – reminiscent of Troblin Might – though they appeared to be under his skin instead of on top of it. In fact, they probably weren’t multiple bands, but instead a single long strip of energy winding it way through his body. One that was already growing shorter, with the end near his left foot burning like a slow fuse.

The time limit on the ability?

Not that Bash planned on wasting any of that time, a small shockwave punctuating his leap at the axe-clops. He didn’t move fast because of a high Dex, but instead because of the sheer amount of raw Str he utilized to jump. That Str showed its other value when he slammed into the axe-clops’s arm, both hammers coming around to strike the giant’s bicep.

There was a great CLANG and CRACK as metal armor crumpled, something fracturing beneath it, and the whole Wild-Boss skidded sideways in the grass, helm jerking around in surprise at the sudden and terrible impact. Just like that, a whole… three percent vanished from the Uniclops’s health bar!? Just how much punishment can this thing take?

That blow could’ve shattered a mountain, and the Wild-Boss took it handedly, its axe already lifting and falling in retaliation – towards Ilrolik. At least Don’t Look at Me! was doing its job, transferring all the threat from Bash’s attack over to where it needed to be on the tank. And, if any of the party was dismayed by the display of durability, they didn’t show it. If anything, it lit a spark of competition between them.

“Hah, can’t let that little guy show us up now, can we Devison?” Loan roared, reaching his big hands over to a pair of his own tattoos. While the Shaper may’ve been putting more points into Dex recently, that didn’t change he had a few tattoos specifically geared for doing massive damage quickly. The two he chose were both A-Rank tools perfect for this particular job.

The first, Rising Inevitability worked kind of like Hiral’s Rune of Gravity, except it started small and built with each consecutive hit. It always proved to be a crowd favorite in the Amphitheatre of the Sun because it put a kind of timer on the match. While Loan’s first blows wouldn’t hit with the same force as Bash was from the get go, they would build towards terrifying weight behind each punch. Worse – for the giant – there wasn’t a known upper limit on how heavy Loan’s blows would become. Nothing had survived long enough to find the threshold.

His second tattoo wasn’t any less potent than the first, but its was significantly flashier. Body of the Sun was another kind of berserking-type ability, transforming Loan’s solar energy directly into a larger body that surrounded his own. Where the man had already stood at over seven feet before, energy wrapped around him to forge a new body almost double that size. Composed of shades of yellows, reds, and oranges, it looked a lot like when Seena compressed her flames into plasma. Except this one had all of the features and details of Hiral’s mentor.

This was another ability that put Loan on a timer, as it would constantly drain his solar energy until he ran out – there was no turning it off now that it was on. At most, he had two or three minutes to benefit from a huge jump in attributes. If Hiral’s Domain of the Sun+ affected him, he might get more out of the buff, but that meant the didn’t have long to down all three giants before they lost one of the powerful front-liners.

Devison – the Grower Loan had spoken to – could only shrug as the now-even-more-massive Shaper charged into the giant, fists already swinging. Apparently, he didn’t have anything quite as potent or visually spectacular to use. Or, did he?

The man had stopped to take a deep breath, but as he did that, a shadow seemed to form behind him. And it wasn’t a trick of the light from the huge, glowing Shaper laying into the giant. No, it churned with solar energy itself, and just as it finally appeared as a full silhouette of Devison, it drifted forward to overlay his body. This wasn’t the same as when Left used Way of Shadow, where the darkness completely covered him. Devison’s ability manifested more like a second image of him that sat just out of sync with him, trailing slightly after him as he leapt forward.

Actually, that was wrong. The image leapt ­first, and Devison’s body followed.

Yanily and Right arrived at the same time the Grower did, the powerful half-dragon form of the spearman’s Aspect charging the air around him with lightning. The energy didn’t have any effect on the giant, and Yan hadn’t opened with Skyfall+ or Dragon’s Breath, but that didn’t mean he was helpless. His Chord of the Primal Storm moved him around the giant like greased lightning, spear spinning, flashing, stabbing, and driving for the joints in the giant’s armor. With Path of Butterflies and the mobility from his own wings, it almost looked like he was everywhere at once, flitting from opening to opening. Every strike found its mark, and a thick, amber liquid trailed the blade of his spear after every attack.

It looked like the Arborean part of the giant’s name wasn’t just for show, with sap running through its veins instead of blood. Did it even have veins? Muscle? Bones?

From the way Right followed Yan in, the double was sure going to find out. By trying to break everything within the armor. Bash and Loan both displayed tremendous strength with their blows, shockwaves bursting in the air with every strike, but Right was not going to be outdone. Auroran Conquerors shining on his fists, purple-and-red energy flowing along his Meridian Lines, and the glow of Hiral’s pseudo-aspect, Right simply appeared directly in front of the axe-clops’s helmet.

A brief pause of surprise ran through the Wild-Boss’s body – opening it up for strikes from all around – as the double stood on planes of pink. Then, in a single, fluid movement – Coat of Amin Thett snapping out around him – Right struck. Hitting so fast, most people on the battlefield likely couldn’t even follow the movement, there was a flash of Infernal and Entropic flames, and then the giant staggered back.

With a fist-print clearly indented in its faceplate, stress-fractures through the metal stretching out around it.

All of this had happened in a few seconds after Hiral called out his Weight of Tomorrow, and he tightened his grip on the weapon, then launched himself forward from planes of Rejection. If anybody wasn’t going to get shown up, it was him.

Power surged through his pseudo-aspect, streaking him across the gap towards his stumbling target. Back went his arms, cocking the heavy weapon in preparation, even as his runes threaded Gravity, Impact, and Breaking into it. His fingers slid the handles along the haft, and he triggered the Here Today, Gone Tomorrow ability to completely overwhelm his target.

Jets of flame roared to life from the back of the hammer, hurling the dragon-like, brass head forward and around at reckless speeds like a runaway Runocerous. The sudden and sheer velocity of the out-of-control swing made it so that anything he struck would truly feel it, and then Hiral was there. Right in front of the Wild-Boss, weapon coming around with enough force to…

… to completely miss.