Chapter 7: Giant Sandworm Progenitor

Our risk tolerance is about 1 in 10. It means that for any difficult part of the dungeon, we train until we reach the point at which we succeed 9 times out of 10. With the number of critical junctures in a dungeon run, we estimate it to be worth our time to try beating the dungeon rather than spend time continuing to train.

While it is certainly the most troublesome part of the dungeon, we long reached that point. Even PinkyKitty, who is our less skilled member in that area, barely fits in our risk tolerance.

Now that we finished training our shortcut, we are switching to our next training target: the Giant Sandworm Progenitor.

Our team has several routines which would usually make this kind of training pretty short, as beating bosses kind of became our specialty, but I have a student I need to prepare as well. This part of the training is more for his sake than ours.

This isn't the first time our party is going for this dungeon's record, but it's the first time our augmented party is doing so.

My student's id is RedFairy. I don't know whether he is actually a she, but it doesn't really matter. His avatar is a male, so I treat him as such.

So far, his style of play isn't truly defined, but as my student, he of courses leans more on the CC side of things. He is a bit more DPS-oriented than me, though, and uses a one-handed sword.

In a fight, a one-handed sword might be easy to handle, but in this game where everyone is superhuman, it has many weaknesses.

The first one is its length: even the longest one-handed swords around are relatively short, and they suffer from a lack of range compared to weapons of a similar category. Because everyone has a great grip and overall strength, there is no lack of long and heavy weapons, like greatswords and halberds.

The second one is its speed: there is no doubt that if it lacks power and reach, speed could be an advantage to be used, but a one-handed sword is truly lacking in this area compared to light weapons like daggers. Even compared to something like a greatsword, above a certain level of strength its advantage is pretty low.

These two problems make the one-handed sword a problematic existence: it is probably the only weapon available in the game that went from a perfectly fine weapon in real life to one of the worst weapons available.

I tried to convince him to switch to another weapon, and consider his insistence of the shape of a one-handed sword, to a katana, as these are symbols of many fantasies in videogames, thus having their speed and damages highly buffed, but it seems like he really was fixated on having a one-handed sword.

At least, he did give up on part of his original idea, as he gave up on dual-wielding when he understood it was pretty impractical to sink time into learning this by yourself.

I did my part already by telling him all of this, so the rest is out of my hands.

Getting back to the matter at hand, if the Giant Sandworms are already huge by nature, standing over a meter large and over 10 meters long, which makes them enemies that can stick out of the ground up to around 4 meters tall, the Giant Sandworm Progenitor is even bigger.

It feels like it took the word "monster" too literally. It is around 5 meters wide, with a central "mouth", that is closer to a hole with many teeth all around it. In a way, its inside reminds me of the inside of a turtle's mouth. You never wish to see it again. Many misaligned rows of teeth, all extremely sharp, pointing towards the inside. You can be sure that if anything gets caught between these teeth, it would never be able to make its way back before being totally ripped to shreds.

And it seems like it is the goal, as attested by the huge quantity of rock and sand that enters but never leaves its mouth.

At least, the game has the decency to replenish the ground behind it.

Anyway, as its name implies, the Giant Sandworm Progenitor is the ancestor of all Giant Sandworms, and of course, the strongest.

Because of its huge size, even relatively slow movements are actually pretty fast.

At least though, its patterns are pretty similar to other Giant Sandworms. It digs around, peeking in and out of the ground in an unpredictable way, as it seeks to eat the player in one sweep.

When eaten, the player takes quite a bit of damage and is thrown out of the other side of the worm, so it is not an instant death penalty, but is not far from it.

Most of the time, you'd want to avoid getting anywhere near its mouth, and use the right timing to hit it.

This is a boss monster, it doesn't respawn until we launch another dungeon instance, so we often avoid strategies that depend on specific and precise timings. We can't do what we did with the Spider Queen and the Lich for every dungeon, or we would simply die of old age before beating every dungeon, not even mentioning the Eagles, that took us all of yesterday and most of today to figure out.

I engage the boss first. I want to be its target, as I am the most fit in the group to manage its aggro. Somewhere along my leveling process, my high Opportunism stat became more useful to avoid attacks than to deal surprise attacks, probably due to my own habits, as this stat only allows you to better see and seize opportunities.

To make sure I'm the one who takes the aggro, I use Attention Grabbing, and get further away from the rest of my team.

The first move of the boss is to project itself in the air and fall down straight towards its target's position.

It's easy enough to avoid, but I want to use that opportunity, which is one of the only times the boss is totally out of the ground.

I use Slip on it. This skill reduces all interactions with anything slippery, by basically removing friction. It means that the Giant Sandworm Progenitor won't be able to dig back into the ground right away.

After using it, I use Palm Push into the ground to project myself quickly away from my current position, with the quickest position to get to being, of course, in the air.

If it was just about avoiding the boss, I would have just taken a few steps away from my original position and it would've ended up just fine.

-Pinky!

This world feels pretty real, and we have known each other for a long time. After all this time, I don't need to throw many words for my team to understand what I want, especially in a practiced routine like this boss we already fought many times.

The opening moves are the part in which we can have planned moves, rather than react to the changes in the situation as it happens.

As the boss reaches my former position, so does Pinky's spell. When I met her, she used the Spellcasting skill to cast various spells, including a powerful explosion, but since then, she long had time to get an Explosion skill on top of that. Using it in combination with Spellcasting makes it truly powerful.

Enough that even the me who pushed myself far above my previous position got further projected by the blast of the explosion.

It doesn't matter really, as the next move counts on SilentVoice.

I don't know whether it was intended from the moment he chose his username, or if it's a coincidence, but Silent has the Assassin skilltree.

His playstyle is a bit too straightforward, maybe due to our influence, but I guess it does not matter. Skilltrees are more something that gives you bonuses rather than a limitation.

Or else, my status as a Ninja could be questioned.

Anyway, one of the skills he has is called Switch. It allows him to switch position with a thrown object, but its evolution, Targeted Switch, is what we will use. Its advantage is that it also works on his party members, and it does not need to be him who is switched.

Right as the explosion is having me tumbling around in the air, Silent switches me with Soul, who instantly chains skills to move down to the boss who is currently stuck on the ground, after being hit by the full blast of Pinky's explosion.

Air Jump, Forward Slash, Quickfall, Falling Slash. These are all skills he chained to reach the Giant Sandworm Progenitor, before finally using the simple but most powerful Slash, dealing a great amount of damage, and projecting it towards Dartagnan, who after a 360° wind-up, used his 1.5-meter long battle hammer to hit it with Crush.

Right as Pinky used her explosion, he had already used Keep, so the boss was still burning and could not enter the ground.

Now that he was in this state, it was just a question of time until we take it down.

-Red!

My student, RedFairy, somehow became one of our main DPS. His DPS are a bit lower than us, but it does have the advantage of not including CC, which is an advantage compared to our strongest skills. Still, he has another skill, which can allow the DPS of our team to deal damage to this boss which cannot move under the combined effect of Keep and Slip:

-Chains!

Dark chains rise from the ground, and quickly bind the boss in place. So long as they are not dealt too much damage, they shouldn't break. And it just happens that we are in a party to deal with this dungeon, and while friendly fire is a thing, this skill is excluded from that.

It is kind of a cheat if you ask me, but it's my fault for not thinking about looking further into potential hidden skilltrees. Who knew that Dark Swordsmen had such a useful skill.

Now be it Soul, Pinky, or Darta, all of them are able to deal the maximum amount of damages they can to this boss, without worrying about where it will be sent or what it will do.

As for me, I use my Amulet of Change to switch skills, and equip Mjolnir. With a legendary weapon and the skills Sword Draw and Hammer Hit equipped, I can deal a good amount of damages. On top of that, Mjolnir can allow me to boost my DPS to the number one spot of the party by a huge margin by using the 423 MP I have but never use with Summon Lightning. My overwhelming amount of mana allows me to use this powerful skill a total of 8 times.

Of course, we are all on one side of the boss, and Pinky on the other. No one wants to be on the path of her ruthless AOE attacks.

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║ Mjolnir

║ Rarity: Legendary

╟━━━━━━━━━━━━━━╢

║ Mjolnir was said to be

║ the hammer of Thor, a

║ god of Norse Mythology.

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║ Attached Skills:

║ Summon Lightning

║ Interception

╚════════════════════╝

╔════════════════════╗

║ Summon Lightning

║ (Mjolnir)

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║ Mjolnir summons

║ lightning, striking

║ down on the target

║ for 10% of its maximum

║ health, with minimum

║ damages amounting to

║ 10% of the user's

║ intelligence

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║ Cost: 50 mana

║ Cooldown: 30 minutes

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With this, we dealt quick work of the boss. This was the last thing we had to do, and it was time for my student to leave.

After that, the rest of our party, which is essentially the guild, went into the PvP arena to do group battles until one of us had to leave. Then we separated and got back to ranking up various categories of the PvP arena in smaller groups or alone.