Eli woke from his nap with a kiss from Bethany on the forehead, "It's almost time for the boss," she said.
"I want to fight it alone," Eli said before even opening his eyes.
"No way in hell is that happening," Tara yelled, and the others nodded their heads in agreement.
"Let me explain," Eli said, "There is something wrong with this event. It's like the system didn't think enough people died last time and it's trying to make this harder than it is supposed to be. Undead at this stage seems a bit much for this early on. I think this boss will be more tricky than anything we have seen so far. Zone and territory monsters are in a class all their own, and that's what it pulls bosses from."
"We have been ok so far, I think we can handle it," Audrey said.
"At least tell us why you think we shouldn't help," Bethany asked, but she had a look on her face like she already understood and was giving him a chance to explain it to the others.
"I can't explain it exactly, but I get this gut feeling that the system is pushing me to get stronger. Like it won't let me sit still and wants to keep putting me into challenges that I might not survive. I know it sounds egotistical, but I think this boss is meant for me to struggle against to either kill me or help me grow."
"I understand," Bethany said before anyone else could respond. "We trust you to do this without dying."
"Like hell we do, I'm not letting you fight alone," Tara yelled furiously.
"I've been having similar postulations myself when thinking about the system's actions. It clearly doesn't want everyone dead but, at least in this beginning, it does want to push everyone hard. I bet that the northern part of this zone is not getting as many monsters as we get, since we are fighting in place of what is supposed to be hundreds of fighters defending the southern part of the safe zone," Audrey said while tapping her chin in thought.
Bethany gave her a side glance then started trying to shuffle everyone out, "Let's leave it to him, after all, we have to trust 'our lord' can do the things he says he can do." Bethany said that last part with a wink in at Eli.
They went outside and stood by the fountain as Eli came out and hugged each of them before walking out of their home area and towards where the monsters came from. He did his best to keep a clear head and focus his mind. It was now ten in the morning-ish but the sun was in twilight like it was still rising. The power that the system had over things like that was hard to get his head around. But understanding that would not let him figure out this boss, most likely it would go along with this undead theme and be a skeletal dragon or some type of stronger lich with lots of minions and tricks.
Eli was secretly praying for the dragon since that would be an amazing fight, a story he could tell for years to come, maybe even earn him a title like dragon slayer or something. He thought it was amazing how much his mind would take him to places of adolescent fantasy when there was a good chance he didn't live through this. Even when he was in the military he would daydream about the people he was freeing from a dictator or warlord throwing him a parade or something. He just really wanted the people to be happy he had been there and for them to know that their lives would get better because of something he did. Now that he was thinking back on it, he probably felt that way to mask his fear that they all hated him because he made things worse.
Dragging his thoughts back to reality, he stood still and waited for a sign of what was coming. At first, nothing happened, then the haze that was still around since the first wave started receding away from him as if someone turned on a giant vacuum. As it cleared it seemed he wasn't far off, at the center of where it was being pulled in there was a barrier with a man inside, well maybe not a man, but something close. He was holding an orb that was gathering the energy from the toxic haze, and a scepter that was running the barrier around him. Eli walked all the way up to him until he was standing just outside the barrier.
Letting the process of removing or recalling the haze continue, Eli focused on what the orb was doing with it but he really couldn't tell at all. He poked the barrier like a kid who was dared to lick a frozen flagpole, and the barrier shocked him and prevented him from getting his hands inside. Gritting with the pain he pushed harder, the barrier warped a little but did not give. As the haze inside the barrier thinned, he got a better look at this boss. It was an eight foot tall mummy wrapped in aged bandages, its eyes and mouth were sewn shut and there was a hole in the center of its chest the same size as the orb it was holding.
Eli conjured a throwing cudgel and threw it, using blink to move it inside the barrier, but it backfired and came back at him. It caught his shoulder, bruising it but it didn't do much damage and he let it dissipate. He really wanted to smash this barrier down and kill this guy but he stood just outside of it and waited, something he had often told his team while deployed was that when things go wrong, the hardest thing to do is nothing. Making rash decisions without all of the information will mostly just make things worse. So he stood there, waiting for its spell to finish with his arms crossed and while tapping his foot.
The energy finished gathering and the boss put the orb in his chest, and hung the barrier scepter on its waist through a loose loop of bandages. Then it held up its arms and tilted its head back as if it was asking the sky for rain. Instead of rain, the ground shook a little and bones from all around were pulled out of the dirt, the bones were the size of the bones on the skeletons they had just fought. Eli sighed since it looked like he was just resurrecting some of the skeletons, but then he noticed that they didn't form humanoid skeletons, they formed giant cats. Five bone cats of slightly differing color were formed when the mummy necromancer boss was done.
Different colored cats, all about twelve feet long and eight feet tall, were now lined up behind the boss. Eli got a sudden flashback to when he was twelve and his first foster home, they had stacks of VHS tapes to watch but all of them were cartoons with giant robots. They only got one channel which mostly played game shows and soap operas, so he always watched the tapes. A smile spread across his face, "I get to fight undead voltron, this is going to be way better than a dragon," he said to himself. Eli wanted to call his friends over so that they could watch him win this fight and then go into the safe zone and tell everyone, but he decided that he would just have fun with it.
Conjuring a slightly heavier version of his cudgel, Eli stretched his shoulders and prepared to jump into action. The boss had a different idea though and had the cats split up, three circled him and two ran towards his friends. He wasn't going to be able to chase them so he decided to make himself enough of a threat that the boss would call the cats back. He wound up for a large smash on the ground, adding his light spell boost and a bit of emotional panic to the swing, but right before he hit the ground he blinked to be above the mummy. He hit the barrier with tremendous force, smashing it down into the ground, causing cracks on the barrier and the scepter.
The mummy immediately drew power from the orb in his chest and prepared a ranged attack so Eli jumped away letting the cats stand between him and the mummy. He let the fight start so that he could get another good hit in, which, he was hoping, would have him call the other cats back. After a little dancing around and some half-committed strikes on the cats, in the middle of an attack on one of the cats he blinked back to the mummy and put a good deal of himself into another strike on the barrier. Cracks formed on its scepter and the barrier weakened considerably, Eli guessed that one more good hit should do it.
While dancing away again and baiting the cats into separating themselves with the large dead trees and uneven terrain, Eli was preparing another timely hit on the barrier. As he prepared his smash skill, it felt different, so different that he didn't want to use it at first. He was frantically dodging and escaping the cats in the woods while staying close enough to the mummy that he would sense a difference if it was going to try something. It was difficult splitting his mind so that he could survive the cat's attacks and pay attention to the apparently new skill rune in his earth node. It wasn't entirely new, it was a more complicated rune than the previous, it would seem he had leveled his skill to 10, he had no idea what it did but he knew how to figure it out.
He again prepared the skill and swung, blinking at the exact right time, but his blink missed a bit and he was too far above the barrier. He had run into this a few times so far but never in this intense of combat, however, the skill still triggered and blasted the barrier, scepter and left arm of the mummy into small pieces. The strike would have killed the mummy too, but it used some kind of air assisted dash movement skill and he just clipped it on the arms. The mummy looked at its missing arm, then touched its forehead drawing a rune and the cats changed direction towards the boss. When they got to him, they collapsed into a pile of bones, then the other two cats showed up and their bones joined with the pile.
Eli was secretly hoping for some kind of voltron situation, but he was disappointed when it slowly formed into a larger cat made from bones. He could feel the mummy's power from the middle of the cat, if this new creature could even be called a cat anymore. It had the body of a cat but with spikes and blades protruding down its spine, and its head was half-way between a tiger and a Chinese dragon with long whiskers made out of magic. Eli waited the 20 or so seconds it took for it to form patiently and when it was done he faced off against it and it immediately coiled itself up preparing to pounce.
He sensed the magic just before it activated the dash skill and jumped forward, Eli jumped high into the air just in time for the cat to appear where he had been and bite down on the spot where he had been standing. His best idea at the time was to throw his cudgel from mid air, focusing on his strength and aiming for its neck, he threw it as hard as he could just as he sent a pulse of his death magic into it. The collision came in the form of a violent reaction as the magics fought one another, the concussion from that knocked Eli around in the air and he landed on the ground on his back, cracking some ribs due to how he hit the ground.
The cat dragon boss monster was damaged, but it reformed in a few seconds but it was smaller than before, maybe fifteen or so percent smaller. Eli didn't wait for it to finish this time and started throwing cudgels at it laced with his death magic, just as it was about to finish reforming it would take more damage and try to reform smaller again. Eli was burning through his magic but the boss was smaller now, barely twice as tall as he was and he could see the mummy inside. In its smaller size however, it was much more agile and it started to dodge his throws as it tried to close the distance.
Right when it was close enough to pounce, Eli sidestepped and drove his hand into the bones grabbing the mummy and pulling it out of the bones and on to the ground. The bones that were left fell into a pile. The bones started to form back into two smaller cats, but they were clearly having trouble now that the mummy controlling them was panicking. It was firing smaller versions of its ranged attack at Eli trying to get him to let go, but he was just taking them while holding tight to the mummy. Its frantic flailing limbs and half formed spells were not enough to stop him however, and there was fury in its eyes.
He held onto the mummy with its good arm and conjured another cudgel and with the same predatory smile similar to the cats he had just destroyed he beat the mummy into the ground until it too melted. Falling onto his back, Eli smiled up at the sky as it started to lighten up and his vision filled with system windows. He had done it, by himself, and with a lot of injuries, but he was proud of the accomplishment until he realized that this meant that the system would probably try harder next time. He frowned at the thought, tried to get up, fell back down, and just closed his eyes.