Crimson Rosario - An SAO Fanfic - Yuuki Konno X OC

°•¤●The Essence of Light : Converging●¤•°

[Chapter 21]

"Hey, get back here!!"

"Catch me if you can, HAH!" Jun sprinted gallantly across the grand marble halls, hands high and showing no signs of stopping to give me a break.

"You're not getting to that boss room before I do, Jun!" I boasted in high spirits.

It's been quite some time since we moved as a guild, just among us. There was a few weeks period between our last expedition together until now, though it felt like months. It's certainly a great change of pace.

Every step we take here is quite literally a step closer to our end goal. This chance to fight alongside my friends with the time we have left, I'm grateful for it. That being said, we've been distant from the other party members behind us for quite some time now.

The ceiling is arched, shaded in black and decorated with lines of various spectral colours. This made me ponder the last time I've seen it, it was when we attempted to beat the boss ourselves before finding help many days ago.

I then realized that it would still be a taxing feat to take down a behemoth such as that, even with Akato's help. We considered many tactics, and have tried fighting it several times before. Each attempt was studied thoroughly, its attacks, its movements, everything we could think of. Yet with all that effort, we couldn't even drop its health bar to the red.

It was tanky, fast, huge, all aspects of the boss were scaled to a menacing degree. I later heard some parties around the inn were too scared to fight it again after just one try. It had built quite the reputation on such short notice.

Heh, what am I kidding? I doubt the front lines would even be bothered.

To take into account our forces, let's skim through our previous approach to defeat the boss;

Tecchi is our best line of defence, without him we would've been wiped out before even doing enough damage to turn the health bar yellow.

Nori will go for the arms, trying to loosen the boss's grip of his double hammers.

Siune will give us constant backup, making sure none of us slows down in the heat of battle,

Jun and Talken will aim for the legs to have it grounded and render it immobile,

While I will have the role of gaining its attention and focus on parrying its strikes. Easier said than done, the plan is already set to motion many times before yet bore no fruit. We died one by one until eventually we failed and returned to spawn.

"Hey, Yuuki," Jun called out to me, finally stopping from all the running.

"Yeah?" ending my rush of thoughts, I caught up to him. He took a short moment to put it into words, but I barely noticed the delay.

"Sorry,"

Hm? That seems out of place.

"Eh? Why?"

"I shouldn't have said what I said. That was quite rude of me."

"Oh, so you do want to apologize," I say sarcastically, paying no mind to it. "It's okay though, I mean it. I understood exactly why you were upset. To be honest, I was too."

Jun looked down for a bit, gathering his thoughts soon after,

"Well, you see... I got a slight confession to make,"