The first thing John noticed was that the swamp water was back to its previous levels. All that which had been boiled away was back. Whether it had rained back down, otherwise condensed, or been refilled by magical means was up to interpretation. Fact was, it was back. The changes John and everyone else had made remained, however.

The teeth of the Raid were sealed back up, making John hopeful for a moment that the first enemy may have respawned. Now, this being grounds for joy may be slightly confusing to some, but an enemy that was both easy to farm and gave ludicrous amounts of experience was exactly what John was looking for. Sending Beatrice in to scout, however, it turned out that only the entrance had been reset and probably only to give them the maw opening sequence again. It looked quite imposing, but he was seeing it for the third time, so his respect was rather limited.

It was like that hard bossfight that followed an awesome cutscene, to which some idiot decided to put the last save point in front of said cutscene and make it unskippable. The awesomeness was rather diminished if it was something he had to sit through before every attempt at the boss. Eventually, the whole thing was just annoying.

‘Now, how to approach that second Dragonkin?’ John wondered, summoning a map of the caverns as they knew so far. Shortly after the entrance the entire thing suddenly twisted right. A long, slightly wound corridor followed, at the end of which the first Dragonkin had stood, just in front of a second, now left oriented, corner. Sylph’s glance at the female Dragonkin had been rather hasty, but it hadn’t looked like she was too far away, ten metres at worst.

She had used the lava in the nearby basins to attack. It was basically a given she also had the fire breath and fire immunity. By her looks, she was physically inferior to the first Dragonkin, but not by much. It was also somewhat likely that she was more agile, although that was inferring information.

Trying to goad a mage into their trap was unlikely to yield any real results. Also, he doubted she would leave the area. Sure, spawn-point tethering wasn’t a thing, but John was just going to assume another thing and say that a mage utilizing lava basins wouldn’t move too far away from said lava basins.

The good news was that, if the main weapon was that lava, John had several ways of recourse. He drew up a battle plan. Aclysia and Beatrice were to go on in first and take the initial wave of attacks. Once the enemy realized they couldn’t utilize lava, they would either have to go into some sort of physical attack pattern or try to get creative with it. If the former happened, John was fairly certain the two Artificial Spirits could, with backline support from Salamander, the Mandala Sphere and Sylph, take the Dragonkin out given enough time. In the case of the latter, Salamander and Gnome would fuse into Smlere and contest that control.

John’s calculation was off on two instances. The Dragonkin didn’t decide to either get creative or go physical, she decided to do both. Although the lava couldn’t hurt the Artificial Spirits, it could immobilize them, so the Dragonkin created tight bindings around their feet with the lava, while also wrapping a bunch of volcanic stone around the business end of her staff, creating a massive hammer. The second miscalculation was to think Smlere could stop any of this, the Dragonkin was a bit hindered by the volcano elemental’s efforts, but ultimately turned out to be the stronger of the two magic users.

A retreat was forced, spending the teleport cooldown of each bound Artificial Spirits. Smlere escaped on foot, the Dragonkin chasing her right up to the stone teeth but no further. After a warning hiss, the creature turned and walked back to her original position.

‘What to do, what to do…’ John thought as he pondered over alternative plans. They had blown their initial advantage, so Aclysia and Beatrice would get directly assaulted with binding attacks the next time around. He could buff up Smlere by making her a three or four type Combination, but that would come at the cost of something else he had been preparing.

The next plan he came up with was entirely focused on controlling the enemy, rather than creating favourable conditions. That worked better. Aclysia and Beatrice still charged in first, but while the enemy was focused on immobilizing them, Gnome and Siena sneaked behind the enemy by combining into Darkness. In the lava lit cave, Siena wouldn’t have been able to smoothly slide through the shadows, a problem Darkness didn’t have, as she could create her own shadow. It was equally obvious when spotted and easy to miss if something else was going on. Smuggling Gnome behind the frontline that way was the true value anyway.

While the Dragonkin tried to immobilize the Artificial Spirits, Darkness split, leaving Gnome to grab the female lizard centaur creature by the tail. Startled by this, the enemy divided her attention. Siena running up her back surely also didn’t help. Although Siena was thrown off in the following thrashing, Gnome managed to hold onto the tail with her raw Strength and Endurance. Although a bit sloppy, this was good enough for John, as time was bought for the maids to hack themselves out of their half-formed bindings and then get into melee range.

From there, it was a desperate fight, Salamander, Sylph and even Undine soon joined in. As did John, with the Mandala Sphere, giving all the orders from the safe outside. The Dragonkin succeeded in several of her strikes and magic attacks, killing Sylph and Gnome, at one point blasting Beatrice’s torso off her legs with a hammer strike and almost squashing Salamander in her fist. That last one turned out to be the Dragonkin’s fatal mistake, as it opened her up to an attack by Aclysia that cleaved her spell-casting arm straight off. After that, the battle soon swung in their favour, with the Dragonkin managing to hold on for another five minutes before Siena managed to tear the monster’s throat out.

‘That took two hours for one mob… totally worth it though,’ John thought as he allocated twenty of the newly gained twenty-one Stat Points into Wisdom, pushing it to 500. He had finally gotten there. The remaining one point he kept for now, not quite sure where to locate it yet.

‘Oh yeah, it’s all coming together,’ the Gamer smirked. That was one hell of a hefty increase. It pushed his MP Regeneration to 28 per second, leaving a lot of mana open beyond that 9 that he usually paid as Sustained Cost. ‘Well, it could be 10,’ he drily thought to himself, running the calculations out of sheer boredom. He had to wait for two elementals to be revived and that would take a bit. ‘10%, or 2,8, for the Artificial Spirits, 2 MP per second flat from the contact lens Possessions and 15%, or 4,2, for the elementals. Would be 18% if the item form didn’t make the active summon free,’ he gently pat the golden egg that hung off a chain from his pants.

‘Boooooooreeeeeeeed,’ Stirwin complained. ‘Can come out?’

‘Yes,’ John confirmed and the infinity elemental jumped off to stretch his leg. The last few days had been a bit of an experiment as to whether or not he could keep Stirwin equipped for several days and whether that would keep adding mana to his eventual Unleash. The answer, sadly, was no. The maximum seemed to be about half a day. There was no cheesing out a massive Stirwin to throw at the Raid boss.

The next Dragonkin enemy seemed to be just another female mage, already a bit more difficult because that one stood at the end of a very long corridor. The strategy against her was rather simple at first: have Sylph kite that one into the short corridor where they had beaten the other one and do the same again. Given that they now had some experience in fighting that creature, it should have been easier.

Well, there was a nasty surprise. Not for any of the girls inside, but for John. Halfway through the fight, an invisible Dragonkin, a whole lot smaller than his brethren, which put him at around John’s size standing, tried to assassinate him.

The Gamer was tipped off slightly in advance, noticing the footsteps along the swamp pathway. The water above the stone ways turned out to be useful for more than just hiding the ways themselves. Not that that even seemed to work against the Dragonkin assassin, who found the path towards John rapidly.

Two strikes with arm-long daggers bounced off Mana Protection, taking down the pre-charged layer almost completely. At the same time as arcane sparks flew, the enemy was unveiled. Aside from his size, the assassin also had considerably more bright orange hair falling from the ridge of his back.

A third strike then dug into John’s mana pool, but the Gamer had managed to come up with an emergency measure. Using Mana Double, he brought the Mandala Sphere back from the cave, as he ran away from the Dragonkin assassin. Something that only caused his mana to dwindle further, the monster was easefully keeping up with him on the ground. Thanks to the speed boost from gaining 50 Agility and John having that hint just a few moments earlier, he and the shape-shifted Mandala Sphere met up and the Gamer used his double to fly himself up into the air.

That still wasn’t secure; the assassin was spewing concentrated fireballs at them (or hims, rather, since it was two times himself) but not at an interval regular enough to get through Mana Protection, as long as they dodged most of those.

Inside, without John’s mana to support them, the girls had a bit of a hard time, but ultimately were victorious against the mage, with only Sylph dying again. Fighting against enemies with many area attacks in confined spaces clearly wasn’t her preferred battleground. Afterwards, they came out and made relatively short work of the assassin. All that Dragonkin could do was relentlessly attack, his defences were incredibly low, so he was easy fodder when forced to fight multiple targets.

Also seemed like he was worth less experience, or the two enemies counted as one. Could also be that John was already going through the motions of the experience gain reducing drastically due to level approximation. He was level 191 now. He still held off on spending the Stat Points, wanting to think over his next priority carefully. That was best done once they were done for the day. Which was after the next fight.

After yet another recuperation period of revival, rest and mana refilling, they scouted out the next and, from the looks of it, last enemy pack. The winding path through the cave entered an oval room from the right side. It was decently large, but unlikely to be the boss room, as two male Dragonkin with a glaive each guarded a large stone door, less crafted than melted into shape. The boss was almost guaranteed to be behind that.

After some debating on how to approach this, John decided to emulate the strategy that had initially worked for them. They did so by separating into three teams. Team one (Beatrice and Sylph) would lure one Dragonkin out into the swamp, team two (Gnome, Aclysia and John) would kill the trapped Dragonkin, and team three (Salamander, Siena and Undine) would occupy the other one, focusing only on surviving. Team one would go help team three out once the Dragonkin was trapped.

It went… well, it worked, but to say it was a clean kill would have been a blatant lie. While they did manage to separate the two enemies, the kiting into the swamp was complicated extremely by the higher distance they had to goad the enemy through. The first time, Sylph, the original girl on kite duty, was overenthusiastic, causing the Dragonkin to lose sight of her, turn around and sandwich team three, leading to their wipe-out pretty much immediately. At this point, the elementals got a bit cranky at the amount of times many of them had died that day. It was John’s newly buffed up MP regeneration that kept their deaths relatively short.

Attempt two went better, Sylph and Beatrice working off each other to maintain the enemies aggression towards them. Just that it, again, killed Sylph on the last few metres. A cone of fire seared the glass-canon out of existence. That Dragonkin was also more cautious than its predecessor at the start of the dungeon, so he didn’t fall into the swamp as easily. With a lot of force, shoving and prodding, they still managed to make him fall in eventually. The Dragonkin died much in the same manner as the initial one, slowly getting ground down by a sheer endless barrage of spells.

Problem was just that team three still inside was half-wiped out before Beatrice even got back, Undine teleporting back to John and Salamander only standing thanks to being largely immune to fire. Although, ironically, not as completely as her opponent was.

So, they killed one, but their power was too low afterwards to kill the second one as well. Salamander also teleported back to John and they recovered again, reviving Siena and Sylph, who were both very cranky now.

Attempt three, they just had to deal with the one, so they could pretty smoothly execute the working strategy without having to split anyone off. Which made the whole thing so much easier. In the end, they killed that last enemy.

And that was worth ‘only’ 4 more levels. The brakes were definitely being gently applied. Not that John complained, he had gotten twenty-one levels since getting into this barrier. He had almost gotten back all that lost time, at least as far as power growth was concerned.

He called it a day there. Which was long overdue. His want to get one more pack done had put them at 14 hours of either fighting or revival pauses. They were all in need of a shower, a good meal and sleep.