Chapter 168: A Positive Sign

The Ancestral Obsidian Colossus’s fists crashed down where Jaxir had been standing, sending a wave of broken stone across the ground as he threw himself clear. Jaxir came out of the movement already looking over the golem again, but this time the grin that usually appeared once a fight started never quite made it onto his face. If he wanted to get through this quest quickly, he couldn’t afford to treat every target like another chance to screw around.

The last Elite he’d fought had nearly handed him his ass, and that pirate captain had only been Level 20 without the enormous HP and MP reserves of an actual regional boss. This thing was Level 22, which pushed it into Tier 3 and meant its Root Abilities should average roughly ten Levels higher than the pirate captain’s had been before everything else about an Elite was taken into account.

Charging in just to see what happened didn’t seem like it would work this time. More importantly, he didn’t have the time for it.

Gamers learned attack patterns first, didn’t they?

Jaxir’s eyes moved across the cavern while the Colossus bent and tore a slab of stone from the ground beside it, lifting the thing as though it weighed nothing. He watched the shoulders turn, the arm draw back, and the weight shift through its torso, giving him more than enough warning to begin moving before the throw came. Then the actual throwing motion started.

The arm became a blur.

Jaxir pushed off to the side, only for the boulder to burst apart halfway across the distance and become a storm of heavy fragments spreading across half the battlefield. There wasn’t enough room to escape all of them, and several pieces hammered into his Aegis while the rest tore past his robes. Dozens of stored MP disappeared with every impact.

Jaxir clicked his tongue and kept moving.

He had actually learned his lesson after the last few fights and filled the Aegis before going after the Black Gem Alpha, but that bit of responsible planning had accomplished absolutely nothing. The armor leaked mana over time, and after logging off, sleeping through the night, working on his lawn, and coming back hours later, everything he’d stored inside it had already drained away.

Then the Mage Conjurer God’s quest had teleported him here before he’d even considered filling it again.

That only left his Grand Mana Potions.

Jaxir had somewhere around ninety left, which was an absurd amount of instant mana by almost anyone else’s standards, but filling the Aegis from empty would eat through more than twenty of them in one sitting. He could already feel some part of himself recoiling at the thought of pouring that many potions into one piece of equipment. Unfortunately, the Colossus didn’t seem interested in waiting for him to find a cheaper solution.

Another boulder came apart overhead.

Jaxir moved through the fragments while his jaw tightened, then glanced toward the time remaining before his uncle’s deadline as though he needed the reminder. Once today ended, he would have one day left to put himself in the best possible position before the Chance Corporation made whatever move it had been preparing. Saving potions wouldn’t matter much if being stingy here cost him the entire day.

"Fine."

Jaxir pulled the first potion from his Inventory and drank.

From there, the fight settled into something much less exciting than most of Jaxir’s battles. He moved, watched, drank, and occasionally tested the Colossus whenever an opening appeared, caring far more about learning what the creature could do than hurting it. Every potion pushed another five hundred MP into the Aegis while every exchange taught him something new.

The golem’s movement was terrible.

It turned slowly, changed direction with the grace of a falling building, and needed several seconds to wrench larger projectiles from the ground. The problem was that once an attack actually began, the difference disappeared almost entirely. Its arm accelerated with startling speed, and anything it threw fragmented across such a wide area that simply being faster than the original projectile wasn’t enough.

Jaxir tested its defenses with simple Casts whenever he had the room.

The first struck its chest and scattered uselessly across the stone, while another hit the shoulder hard enough to break off a thin outer layer without reaching anything important underneath. Even when Jaxir Charged the next Cast and concentrated the impact into one point, the damaged stone simply flaked away before fresh earth crawled over the opening. Within seconds, there was no sign he’d hit it at all.

If ranged attacks couldn’t punch through, closing the distance seemed like the obvious answer, so Jaxir tested that next instead of assuming the game would make his life easy. He pushed inside the Colossus’s throwing range and immediately felt mana surge through the ground beneath his feet.

Stone spikes erupted everywhere.

Jaxir barely twisted away from the first one before another ripped upward beside him, forcing him into a third that clipped his Aegis hard enough to tear away another large chunk of stored mana. The attack followed his retreat until he escaped the golem’s immediate vicinity, and by the time the ground settled again, two entire potions worth of what he’d already stored were gone.

[-237]

Jaxir stared at the Colossus from a safer distance.

An Elite regional boss really was a headache.

The Colossus had covered the obvious weaknesses of its poor mobility with wide-area attacks at range and control over the ground up close. Its regeneration made chipping away at it pointless, while its attack speed meant waiting too long to respond after recognizing a pattern would get him hit anyway.

Jaxir stopped looking for some easy opening and started paying closer attention to the transitions instead.

Throw, pause, recover.

Ground control, pause, turn.

Every action had something before it and something after it, and those spaces were where the creature became manageable. Jaxir kept circling while committing the rhythm to memory, occasionally provoking one attack just to see whether the next always followed the same way. Most of the time, it did.

Another potion disappeared.

Then another.

Jaxir stopped caring about the number for a while and let the process become mechanical, drinking whenever the Aegis had room while forcing the Colossus to show him the same attacks from different angles. He learned how far the fragments spread, how close he could approach before the ground reacted, and how long the stone shell took to replace itself after damage. None of it gave him an answer yet, but the creature was becoming less mysterious with every exchange.

By the time the twenty-second potion emptied, Jaxir had learned enough.

He slid across the ground beneath another scattering of stone and came to a stop outside the impact zone, tossing the empty vial aside as the Aegis finally reached capacity. Silvery-blue light flooded through the inner skin beneath his white-gold robes, spreading across his body until the glow escaped through every small gap in the fabric. Jaxir checked his remaining potions and grinned.

"Sixty-nine left. I’m taking that as a positive sign."

The Colossus tore another boulder from the ground.

This time, Jaxir didn’t move immediately.

His hair shifted in the wind rolling through the cavern as he raised his staff, eyes following every familiar movement he’d spent the last several minutes studying. He’d finished preparing.

Now he could have fun.