[System Decay] Chapter 9: Nah, I'd Live (Patreon)

Squad boss?

Examining that brought up a tooltip that Will definitely really have used earlier.

Boss Tiers:

A boss’ tier is determined by the minimum projected size of the party required to defeat it with some degree of difficulty.

Solo. At your current expected level, it will be a challenge to defeat this boss, but if you draw heavily on your resources, you may be able to manage it.

Squad. At your current expected level, you alone stand next to no chance. Two is a bare minimum, but the expected count required to take one of these down from full health is four. At least twice that is recommended.

You have not yet encountered the following boss tiers: Clan. Militia. Battalion. Army. Nation. Planet.

That’s not good, Will thought. The Carrion Lord was a squad level boss, which was second in a worryingly long list of names.

Right now, the system appeared to be telling him that he was well and truly screwed.

Against the poorer goblin chieftain, Will had been able to use barrelmancy thanks to the poor planning of the ambush and the interaction of items and attacks with safe zones. The spider, on the other hand, had been a hard fight, but it wasn’t very intelligent and opened itself up to attacks outside its context for what was possible.

The Carrion Lord, however, was clearly intelligent. Will didn’t know how powerful the elves had been, but he’d clearly managed to subdue and/or kill a whole bunch of them.

He gave Caiyeri a side-eye, trying to gauge her.

Caiyeri Seven. Bronze 3 Gambler.

This User is currently using a stealth skill. Further details have been hidden.

Huh. That was a different style of stat exposition than he’d seen from the monsters. Was there a difference because she was using a skill? Or were the goblins just not Users?

“Don’t look at me,” Caiyeri said, jerking her chin towards the goblin boss. “He’s waiting for you.”

“A thank-you would be appreciated.”

“I’ll thank you if we live.”

“Fair point.”

Okay. Assuming all of the elves had been at her level or higher—which was a safe assumption to make given that most of the other creatures he’d seen on this level had been bronze—then the Carrion Lord had been able to wipe out a settlement without taking much damage. That armor looked nasty, and the war hammer even nastier.

Up close, Will could see that the Carrion Lord’s face—mostly his mouth—was covered in blood. Judging from the name, it wasn’t his own.

“Do you not have prion diseases?” he asked the goblin, rambling with one part of his mind while the rest scrambled for options. “Mad elf disease? Cannibalism has nutritionary downsides, you know.”

“It’s not cannibalism,” Caiyeri said, lolling her head around. “We’re different species.”

“Whose side are you on?” Will protested.

“Accuracy’s.”

“Load of good that’ll do when you’re dead.”

“I figured you’d have a plan to get us out of here. Do you not?”

“Working on it. Heavily considering leaving the annoying elf lady behind.”

“You might need the annoying elf lady, given your rank.”

Ah. There was no reason she couldn’t examine him if he was able to examine her, and if his profile revealed that he was still unformed… yeah.

“Are you quite finished?” The Carrion Lord observed the two of them bickering with some level of amusement.

At least, Will thought it was amusement. That could have just been him bearing his teeth.

“I did just get here, so if you’d allow me a moment?” Will tried.

To his surprise, the Carrion Lord shrugged, placing his hammer down on the ground with a solid thunk. Will heard what appeared to be derogatory screeching coming from the crowd behind him, but he ignored them. If he managed to defeat this boss, he wasn’t going to be able to ignore the horde, but Will was a solve-one-problem-at-a-time kind of guy.

“So long as you do not flee,” the squad boss said. “You may prepare as you’d like.”

That was odd. From fantasy media and the first encampment of goblins he’d seen, Will had gained the impression of goblins being barbaric little gremlins, but here they were, instead acting like a well-put together death cult.

Then again, the other chieftain had also been surprisingly articulate. Maybe there was something to that.

Options, options, options. Will had his oil barrels, but he was pretty certain he wasn’t going to be able to use those without killing himself and the elf. The objective of saving the latter was rapidly falling down his priorities list, but he still much preferred making it out alive.

Other than that, he had a ton of loot. How much of that could be relevant… well, Will wasn’t sure about that.

“Don’t mind me,” he said, prompting one of his crates to pop out from his inventory. “I’m not attacking. Yet.”

The Carrion Lord chuckled and gestured for him to continue.

Bit by bit, Will unloaded almost everything from his inventory. Based on the disapproving screams behind him, the other goblins didn’t particularly like this, but the Carrion Lord didn’t make a move to stop him.

He wasn’t sure what he was going to accomplish with this, but it wasn’t like he was going to be able to on-the-fly drop stuff from his inventory while he was fighting.

“Offerings will not protect you from the Hunger, friend,” the Carrion Lord said. “They are much appreciated, but He will not be satisfied until He has fed upon the flesh of war.”

“You seem to know a lot about the Hunger,” Will said. “Care to tell me some more?”

Caiyeri raised an eyebrow at him. He ignored her.

Will’s campus had been frequented by Jehovah’s Witnesses. Every time one of them engaged him on the sidewalk, it would take ages before they finally realized he wasn’t interested and left. One time, he’d bet a friend that if he tried to engage with them in good faith and speak on their terms, they might leave him alone faster.

He’d been dead wrong. An hour and a half after the first one started talking to him, he’d somehow acquired a small group of them, all of them discussing some obscure passage he’d never read.

The Carrion Lord was no Jehovah’s Witness, but the system had told Will that he was a cleric. Surely there had to be some similarities.

The goblin leader’s eyes lit up, and Will knew he had him.

“He is the one who awaits us at the end of time,” the Carrion Lord began. “The Hunger is He who will one day devour the world. His teachings grant us power; his blessings, strength. By consumption we grow, and by His will we rise.”

At this, the jeering and screeching of the crowd died down to a respectful silence.

Will tuned the goblin out and looked through the stuff he’d his inventory for options.

Helper wasn’t here, so all he had to rely on was himself, his loot, and a dubiously helpful restrained elf.

Great.

Will retracted the crates that he was sure were going to be useless back into his inventory.

The axe of despair, teleport dagger, and seven-shot six-shooter were likely to be his best bets for making progress here. The revolver was freshly reloaded, which helped.

That armor the Carrion Lord had on was definitely magical. Will didn’t know if he could breask through that, but he did have a potion that might be able to help.

You have consumed a potion above your rank. You will not be able to benefit from strength potions for the next [5 minutes].

A surge of power fluttered through his veins. His heart started pumping faster, more erratically. It reminded him of the sensation of drinking Panera Bread’s charged lemonade immediately after downing a Red Bull to stay awake through his second consecutive all-nighter a couple months back, except with less heart failure involved.

The system had granted him bronze rank strength potions alongside the health ones, which he hadn’t consumed up until now. As the potion took effect, the weight of his weapons seemed to decrease. They might as well have been made of styrofoam.

Will looked down. There had been no visual change, but he felt different. Stronger.

“I suppose that only makes sense. It is a strength potion.”

“Are you talking to yourself?” Caiyeri leaned her head back and sighed deeply. “I’m so dead.”

Will was suddenly extremely tempted to prove her right by using his newfound strength to leap to the vent on the ceiling and teleport away, but he held off.

“— — — ————.”

“What was that?” Will leaned in towards Caiyeri. Her whisper had been too quiet for him to hear.

“Go for the underarms,” she hissed. “The armor has a weak point there.”

Will nodded, thankful that she could at least contribute something.

Last check before he acted. He had two objectives here.

1) Free Caiyeri and get away alive, and—

2) Kill the boss.

There was technically nothing restricting him from just running away immediately, but as much as he found her annoying, Will wasn’t going to abandon Caiyeri to be eaten. He’d always wondered what type of person he’d be in a crisis. He wasn’t disappointed with the result.

“Are you ready now?” the Carrion Lord asked, hefting his hammer once more. “You don’t look ready.”

In lieu of an answer, Will raised the revolver and fired his first shot.

[Incendiary selected.]

Will was glad he hadn’t dumped the oil barrels out of his inventory. That would have made this extraordinarily awkward.

He heard a sharp ping as the bullet hit something that definitely wasn’t flesh. For an instant, pale blue light shimmered over the Carrion Lord’s face. The field faded, replaced by the roiling flames of the bullet.

The flaming oil stuck to the huge goblin’s armor, but it didn’t seem to affect him or the magical plate. He threw his head back and laughed.

“Devour my pain. The Hunger will be pleased to see one such as you!” he roared, gripping his now-flaming war hammer in both hands. It glowed a sickly green. “Let us begin.”

In the corner of his vision, Will could see Caiyeri trying to scoot away.

He readied the teleport dagger. There were vents behind the goblin boss. If he could get in a surprise attack from there—

The massive hammer glowed bright enough to be painful and the Carrion Lord disappeared. The goblins cheered.

“Above you!” Caiyeri shouted.

Will looked up just in time to see the massive form of the goblin descending from the vent above. From his perspective below, the still-flaming goblin was a falling meteor. Had the hammer grown in size?

He ran, trying to escape the impact point, but the Carrion Lord adjusted, which immediately registered in his mind as physics-defying bullshit. You weren’t supposed to be able to shift the direction of your fall; then again, the laws of physics had seemed more like loose suggestions for a couple of days now.

“Hunger, give me your brush,” the goblin roared, and he dove.

Will abandoned all thought of potentially hitting the goblin as he fell and just ran for his life. Escape Artist lived up to its name, enabling him to sprint faster than he’d ever dreamed of going before the fall, but it wasn’t fast enough.

A deafening crash coincided with sudden, crushing agony in Will’s left leg. He stumbled, and at the speed he was going, stumbling meant crashing.

While physics didn’t apply to the insane skills that everyone was throwing around, they still very much enforced themselves on him. Will got all the way through stop, drop, and roll before he managed to slow himself.

Okay, saying that he managed to slow himself might have been an exaggeration. He slammed into a wall and groaned, pain coursing through his body.

Everything hurt, but his leg especially so. The rest of his body didn’t feel much worse than the one time he flew off the swing when he was nine—a solid four of ten on the pain scale. His leg, though, was at an eight. He’d had surgery where the anesthesia had failed halfway through before. This wasn’t quite that bad, but it was close.

Will grit his teeth. I will not give this thing the pleasure of hearing me scream.

[Resistance] advanced to Unformed 6!

He slammed an unformed-rank health potion down. The pain went from a four to a two across most of his body, but his leg barely improved.

This was, he quickly realized, because his pants had caught on fire.

“Shit. Isn’t stop-drop-rolling supposed to put it out?”

A heavy set of footfalls reminded Will that the Carrion Lord was still here and had yet to take a real hit.

Squad boss indeed.

Will took what at the moment felt like the most logical course of action. He took his pants off.

He tossed the flaming fabric aside as the goblin boss completed its running start towards him and jumped high enough to make an NBA player jealous.

This time, the hammer glowed less brightly than it had before. Will hoped that meant the goblin wouldn’t have the homing dive he had last time.

He downed another unformed-rank healing potion. The cooldown was only six seconds since it was the same level, but it came with the tradeoff that just two were nowhere near enough to patch up all his wounds.

Thankfully, Escape Artist gave him enough speed to get out from under the second devastating hammer blow.

“You’re doing great,” Caiyeri called out.

“Go fuck yourself,” Will replied.

In his moment of reprieve, he fired the revolver again.

[Rebounding Shot selected.]

Once again, a pale blue forcefield of some kind protected the Carrion Lord. Unlike last time, the bullet did not explode into flames. Instead, the dull sound of impact immediately gave way to a terrifyingly close call with a blindingly fast projectile, followed by a wet noise behind him.

You have defeated a Cave Goblin Warrior.

“Oops.”

Level up!

“I’ll take it.”