114. Whack-a-Mole

  As the outrealmers prepared to fight a tentacled monster, the first thing they did was to take stock of their limitations.

  “My PULVERIZER arm is useless!” Serac announced bitterly. And no wonder, for the whole thing had popped out of its socket and locked uselessly in place. Her deformed shoulder continued to burn with pain, but at least it wasn’t losing her any HP. The pain, she could deal with.

  “And I’m still pretty low on health,” Zacko said, considerably calmer. His earlier activation of [Sinner Aspect] had brought his HP down to 1, and despite borrowing Serac’s [Frog in the Well], there hadn’t been enough time for the passive healing to give him a significant buffer.

  In either case, the upshot was that neither Wayfarer could afford to take many hits. Which meant they couldn’t rely on the usual strength of their partnership, namely a clear division of ‘tank’ or ‘DPS’ roles. Both had to evade the Jotuneter’s attacks as much as possible, while both tried to dish back lethal damage in turn.

  Not only that, but they’d also have to play it completely by ear. For the Jotuneter gave them no time to formulate a plan, as it pressed its advantage. It did so with a flurry of tentacle swipes, flying in at once from all directions.

  Duck, jump, and slide. Serac was forced to do all three simultaneously—or quickly enough in succession to make no difference—as she narrowly escaped a kraken’s wrath. The sequence ate a big chunk of her Stamina (and did no favors for her bum shoulder!), but she gritted her teeth and pushed through it, knowing that the enemy was under similar constraints.

  Push off her good arm and hop back on her feet. Then onto the fastest trigger finger in the land. Except… by the time Serac was ready to fire from the hip, her target was gone—slithered back underwater where no bullet could reach it.

  “That’s not fair!” Serac cried. “It’s all we can do to dodge the tentacle attacks, then when it’s finally our turn to fight back, the thing just gets to hide underwater and rest up!”

  “This is one area where the Yakshas have a clear ‘fin’ up on us,” Zacko observed. “Whatever that manta girl was doing, it drove this thing onto the surface for her boyfriend to roast. Want me to try? Not that I’ve got the faintest idea of how to go about it, mind you.”

  Serac forced herself to stay present, pushing aside a storm of emotions that had accompanied the word ‘boyfriend’.

  “No,” she gave her answer after just a moment of weighing up the pros and cons. “Too risky. I think, instead, we should try to get the jump on the tentacles. We know they have to come out of these holes eventually, so if we each cover half of them, we should be able to react before they get a chance to attack.”

  “Ah, so it’s a game of whack-a-mole. Got it!”

  The Narakite had no clue what the Manesferan meant, but she trusted him to be on the same page. The two of them now stood back-to-back, each readying their own hunting ‘tools’. Serac kept her head on a swivel, alert to the slightest movement from any of the openings upon the ice.

  Only… what the Wayfarers failed to account for was that the holes hadn’t always been there. Jotuneter had to have punched them into existence in the first place, and there was nothing stopping its Stamina-replete tentacles from doing it again.

  Along with a loud crack, the ground at Serac’s feet split apart. She did react in time, but not to ‘get the jump’ as she’d hoped. Instead, she was forced to dodge-roll out of the way, landing heavily on her injured shoulder as she did.

  A veritable explosion of pain, enough to break her concentration if not her Poise. The momentary slowdown left her exposed to the rest of the Jotuneter’s ‘combo’.

  One tentacle, two tentacles, then three. What was meant to be a game of ‘whack-a-mole’ quickly became ‘whack-a-Wayfarer’ instead, as a kraken batted a defenseless Rakshasa between its plentiful appendages.

  [116!], [131!], [155!] -> [402!]

  Poise-break! As if the pain, damage, and humiliation weren’t enough, the Rakshasa now found herself helpless on top of defenseless. Unable even to get eyeballs on Zacko, Serac was left completely at the Jotuneter’s mercy. A fourth tentacle did descend then, poised to deal a critically-multiplied finishing blow.

  Thunk!

  Thunk? That didn’t quite sound like a tentacle slapping a Rakshasa to death. No, it sounded more like—

  “Pete! What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  Concentration flooding back along with her Poise, Serac managed to sit up and assess just how she’d survived a sure fatality. Where the fourth tentacle would’ve landed instead stood a [Javelin], leaning at an angle with only its tip buried in solid ice. As for who’d actually thrown the damn thing, simple logic—as well as Zacko’s angry exclamation—told the story plainly enough.

  And precisely because an Anchored soul had taken such a reckless risk on her behalf, she couldn’t let Petter’s heroics go to waste. Serac forced herself to stay present, pushing aside the memory of another similar incident from one Realm below.

  By then, nearly all of the Jotuneter’s appendages had slithered back into hiding, having exhausted their Stamina reserves. Nearly all, save for the one that had been knocked back by the [Javelin]. This lone tentacle was slower and more hesitant in its motion, leaving a portion within the view and range of a Poise-recovered gunslinger.

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  The game of whack-a-mole hadn’t gone quite according to how Serac had pictured it. But even the retreating tail of a mole was worth a ‘point’, as long as she could score a hit. What was more, the sight of Ash’s [Blood-tipped Javelin] had given her a spark of inspiration—a trick up her sleeve that could well turn the game on its head.

  [Chamber One: BLOOD FOR BLOOD]

  [153!]

  [JOTUNETER Status Effect: BLEED]

  [Wayfarer Status Effect: BLEED]

  [Chamber Two: HARVEST]

  [83!]

  [JOTUNETER Status Effect: EARMARKED]

  Two imbuements from successive chambers, yet the bullets just barely managed to take a piece off a slithering tentacle, right before it slipped back into the water. But as far as Pathsight was concerned, that was enough to afflict the whole kraken with a steady DoT effect for the next minute.

  Serac had put herself under the same affliction. She also knew she didn’t have enough HP left to tank the projected loss. Not to worry, however. She’d come prepared for just such a scenario, with several things of dried-up [Ulvknall Liver] sharing the same pocket with a [Frostkrillbane].

  But that could wait. First, she needed to move onto the next phase of the fight. To that end, she rose to her feet and… beat a hasty retreat.

  “Come on, Zacko!” she yelled to get her Manusya partner onto the same page. “We’re gonna hustle back onto Ash, and we better do it fast, before the tentacles come back!”

  Whether thanks to luck or to a Steed’s very real desire to protect its master, Ash the mobile fortress hadn’t traveled too far from the site of battle. Its proximity had allowed a skinny mackerel man to fling a [Javelin] into the thick of the action, and now, it allowed the Wayfarers to join him in short order. And just as soon as Serac and Zacko clambered over its ramparts, Ash itself rumbled into action.

  Not a moment too soon. More of the ice cracked open in Ash’s wake as the Jotuneter punched new holes, now hell-bent on dragging a whole castle into the Netherpool’s frigid depths. The game had suddenly shifted into an amphibious race, with a landbound castle on one side and a sea-dwelling kraken on the other. Ashvanaga proved up to the task, matching the Jotuneter’s velocity, churn for thrust.

  Up on the battlement, the Wayfarers finally had a chance to breathe—though not the room to do so. Munkfred’s ‘mound’ took up nearly the entire space, forcing Serac, Zacko, and Petter to squeeze into the gutters formed between tortoise shell and castle ramparts. But instead of moping about her discomfort, Serac chose to focus on the task at hand—for the fight was far from over.

  “Nice one, Petey,” she now spoke with a mouthful of [Ulvknall Liver], “really saved my ass back there.”

  “D—d—don’t mention it, Miss!” Petter yelled from one side of the tortoise shell, out of view. “But w—w—what will you do about the Jotuneter?”

  “Yeah, about that,” Serac said with a calmness that belied her predicament. The calm was genuine, however, for she finally had a concrete plan for defeating the enemy. “As long as Ash can keep outrunning the tentacles, the full duration of the [Bleed] should put a real dent in the Jotuneter’s health pool. But we still need to get a few more hits in to finish it off. Zacko, you thinking what I’m thinking?”

  “Way ahead of you, princess,” the Manusya’s voice—muffled by VISAGE—sounded from another side, directly across from Serac. “Just back to the basics, isn’t it? Fitting a square peg into a round hole?”

  “Exactly. It’s a lot messier than how the locals might do it, but as long as it gets the job done, I won’t nitpick. A smite is a smite.”

  That sounded like something else Serac had said not that long ago, but this wasn’t the time to dredge up the past, no matter how recent. Instead, she dragged herself into a half-standing position. To achieve any semblance of stability, she had to dig her heels into the rampart while pushing her back into Munkfred. Not the most dignified position, and it was a real bitch on her injured arm, but as long as it got the job done…

  A minute passed, ending the effect of [Blood for Blood] on the Jotuneter. The minute passed without event for the four souls up on the battlement, all thanks to Ash’s tireless ‘skating’ to elude a [Hungry] kraken. But even a castle couldn’t keep up the frenetic pace forever, and it was time to give the good Steed a well-deserved break.

  Serac gave the rampart at her feet a light kick, with just enough force to get Ash’s attention. The signal—along with its master’s intent—got through to Ash; it promptly slowed its churning, until it came to a complete halt.

  Now, the entire castle and its over-capacity occupants were ‘stranded guppies’, at the mercy of a tentacled stalker. A moment of tense silence fell over the proceedings, broken up only by Petter’s choked whimper. Serac sympathized with the fear, certainly, but she didn’t share it, for this was all according to her plan—a hunter using herself as bait.

  The Netherpool opened its jaws. At least a dozen tentacles, dark and glistening, rose from all sides before latching onto Ash’s ramparts.

  Perhaps, from the Jotuneter’s perspective, this was no different from what it’d been trying to do all fight long—to punish landbound souls and their inability to be one with ice and water. Yet, after a long and messy fight, the kraken’s health pool had dwindled to a manageable chunk. And that made all the difference to the landbound souls atop their castle, with their hunting tools at the ready. Because now, one or two whacks would be all it took to put an end to this mole’s antics.

  [DREAMER Aspect: HAMMER OF JUDGMENT]

  [Chamber One: CATHARSIS]

  The sequence had been timed and ordered to perfection.

  First, Zacko unleashed his Erudite-imbued headbutt, channeled and charged for long enough to be a one-shot Poise-breaker. He needed but to connect with the nearest tentacle to enervate the whole kraken. The Jotuneter instantly lost its grip on Ash, as its tentacles flopped back towards the holes whence they came.

  At nearly the same time, but staggered just enough to follow the Poise-break, Serac unleashed her high-DPS finisher. The timing had to be precise for her to A) take advantage of Poise-break’s critical multiplier and B) catch the tentacles before they slid back into the water and doused the black flames of [Catharsis]. The result was a ‘trade’ that would satisfy any Pretjordian, [235!] points of self-damage in exchange for:

  [367!], [612!], [1,223!] -> [2,202!]

  Maybe a bit overkill? Not as far as Serac and her shoulder were concerned! Forget dousing any flames; the ‘mole’ didn’t get a chance to retreat into its hole before it faded into Souldust—on both sides of the ice.

  [2,820 ?]

  [Realmhunt Score: 10 + 100 -> 110]

  do kids these days still play whack-a-mole? My second thought: new story idea, LitRPG about an arcade mole rising up against its whackers...

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