Trials of a VRMMO Healer

Chapter 18 - Goliath

With the adds taken care of, the fight became far more manageable. The next phase consisted mostly of beating on the massive stone monster until it shifted to a quadrupedal stance, at which point it change attack patterns and began to trample back and forth across the battlefield. It was a bit of a slog, and definitely a tough fight, but the group was coordinated enough to deal with simple tank and spank fights. That's kind of how a lot of these raid fights go, to be honest. Raid bosses have a gimmick and once you figure it out, all that's left to do is execute. One of the things I've learned about EO is that while the skill system allows for a great deal of flexibility, most players have tried to min-max their builds using a few basic templates. Not everyone, of course. But from what I've seen on forums and chat rooms, people who try to play weird custom builds are treated kind of badly, like, "Oh, you think you're so clever, huh?" It's true that certain combinations work well, but there's nothing wrong with weird builds! I might not be able to do the same kind of healing that others do, but I have my own way of handling things.

After the fight, we all collapsed in a heap. The fight, in total, had taken almost an hour. That much concentration would wear anyone out. For participating in an event like this, we all got a bit of loot. It was a stone idol in the shape of the goliath we had fought.

"Seems like garbage to me," Zlazh grumbled.

"I don't know, I think it's a neat decoration. We can put it in our guild hall," Dawn Snow responded, though she didn't seem terribly enthusiastic about it.

After some asking around, it turned out that the idols were the ONLY loot that anyone, even Edwin and others on the main team had gotten. The players weren't happy about that. I turned the idol over in my hands, trying to make sense of what I saw with Spirit Sight (as I've decided to dub it). Then it came to me.

"Oh, it's a quest starter."

"What? How can you tell?" Zlazh asked.

I explained a bit about Spirit Sight and my [Spiritist] skill.

"Ok, so you have a skill that can see ghosts and stuff, but how do you know that's a quest starter?"

"Well, it's kind of weird but like, the way spirit stuff works is that you see connections? Between stuff? But there's a difference between living things and things that are dead or static. Like, if I'm seeing people in the past, all that stuff already happened so the influences that I'm reading are just... there, right? But for living things, their influence is like, all over the place because they're still changing things around them and can think for themselves, right? Um... do you know what the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is?"

"Nah," Zlazh told me.

"Oh, I do!" interrupted Dawn Snow, who had started listening in on our conversation. "I'm a physics student."

"Ok, yeah, so like, it talks about how certain properties are tied so the more you know about one, the less you know about the other. It's sort of like that. I can see information about the past because it doesn't change, but I can't change it, but I can change stuff in the present, but I can't see much information. But this idol is sort of flickering between the two. Like, it's an object so it doesn't change but it CAN change. So, I thought about game terms and like, what if it doesn't do anything itself but leads to different things? So it might not be a quest starter but I think it's something like that."

"Huh. So what do we do with it?" Zlazh asked me.

"I'm not sure. It's hard to get useful information because it's so... wobbly. But I think it's pointing in that direction—toward the Amaras Mines, I guess?"

"Oh, that makes sense." Now it was Edwin's turn to interrupt. I guess our conversation had gathered a few onlookers. "I heard that these things spawned after someone discovered an altar in the mines."

"Wait, you didn't think that was connected?!" Zlazh exclaimed.

"Hey, I guess I didn't put it together or whatever."

We got together and decided that we might as well take our raid force and explore the mines. Most players had mounts and Lily offered me a ride again, but I took a look in the direction of the mines.

"I think I can teleport there, actually."

"Wait, what? You can teleport?"

"Yeah, it's another one of the [Spiritism] powers. I can see ley lines and travel between them."

"What the hell, how many powers does that have? I've never heard of any other skills that let you teleport like that."

"Really?"

"Yes. There's a high level magic skill that lets you create a gate and teleport back to it and a high level light magic skill that evacuates your party, but nothing that lets you teleport anywhere."

"Well, it's not ANYwhere, it's just dangerous if I haven't been there before."

"Still! Can you bring other people?"

"I don't know. I still don't know the extent of this power."

"It seems kind of broken, to be honest."

"The way it was explained to me is that usually the system helps us with magic, but this is like taking the training wheels off. It's more flexible but a lot harder because I have to use my actual skill instead of just saying I want to use a certain skill. Oh, but once I've learned something, I can save it as a skill so it's easy to recall. I bet if you learned the rules of how magic worked you could come up with your own stuff, too. Like you did with crafting."

"Hm. I mean, it's still sort of on rails, but you're saying that if I just... made it, then the game might recognize it?"

"It's worth a shot."

"Sure, except I don't know anything about making weapons and armor in real life."

"But you craft it out of sub-pieces, right? Maybe you can use the standard ones and figure out how to change the others."

"Yeah. When you craft normally, you get like, a bunch of different options for parts and can mix and match depending on the materials. That's how you get unique weapons."

"I'll give it a shot when I get back. So are you gonna teleport to the mines?"
"I'm going to try. See you there!"

I waved to Lily and walked toward the ley line outside Illium. The party was moving in the other direction toward the mines. With Spirit Sight I could just barely make out the shimmering lines, twisting in the sky. Just like the last time I let myself be drawn up into the sky. I sped along the line but shifted my focus toward the mines and sure enough as I traveled toward the nexus, as the lines crossed, my path shifted and I descended back town to earth. The truth is, given the time it took to walk to the line and from the end to the mines, I only saved a little time, but eventually the rest of the raid caught up.

"So, it really worked, huh."

"Yep. I get why it's not recommended that you teleport to an unknown place. It's like, I dunno, riding a high-speed conveyor belt and you have to know just when to jump off."

"It's still really handy."

The raid had picked up a number of other players as others noticed the horde and found out where they were headed. By the time they finally arrived at the mines, there were around 50 players. With that many adventurers, making out way down to the bottom of the Deep Trove was no problem. Monsters would leap out to attack someone only to be torn apart by a hail of spells and projectiles before anyone could even engage in melee. It felt a bit like cheating, but I had no idea how these systems balanced themselves. The catwalks between crystal spires gave way to a tunnel system carved deep within the rock. This area was labyrinthine, but I followed the group and it seemed that the path we followed was a large primary passage.

We came to a doorway that at one point had been barricaded by two massive stone doors. The doors now laid in pieces, however. Apparently once the first group had destroyed the guardian here, the doors had fallen. Beyond them was a massive circular room with a domed roof. It was maybe 30 meters in diameter, and every inch of the walls and ceiling was covered in carvings that depicted goliaths of the same type that we had fought. In the center of the room was a raised dais with an indentation just the right size for our idols.

"Well," muttered Edwin, "Who wants to try first?"