ShangriLa Frontier ~ Shitty Games Hunter Challenges Godly Game ~

A man-made dragon named Maxwell Eight-One bares its fangs at us and gets ready to attack the moment we tried to approach it with clearly malicious intentions.

Now, as for our actual opponent standing in front of us, everything about it seemed really imposing. Its body was really imposing. Its head was really imposing. Its wings were really imposing. Its front legs were really imposing. Its hind legs were really imposing. Its tail was really imposing. It may looked like a giant armored balance ball, but it was the kind of ball that made the players going against it think: “Wait, isn’t that pretty much impossible here!?” Now, what was the thing about that “Eight-One” part of its name? Apparently it means that it was the creature that rose to the very top of the food chain during the eight circle of this Controlled Environment experiment or something else alongside those lines. Yeah, it’s nice to know such a little tidbit of information, but I fail to see how that thing is going to help up in here!?

In other words, what I want to say here is that no matter how ridiculous this thing may initially look, you can be certain that it is way stronger than any normal monster that we have faced before in this game. Heck, it is most probably stronger than that Armored Cerberus monster from that other game that I have played at that one time.

「No way! No way! No way! No way! I can’t do it! I can’t do it! I can’t do it! We are going to get killed! We are going to get killed! We are going to get killed! Just take a look at this this! What the hell is this!? Even Siegwurm was way more sympathetic than this thing is! And that’s saying a whole lot when you compare something like this to a Unique Monster!」

「Don’t get intimidated by this thing before we even get to fight it! First order of business: let’s determine what kind of movements and attack patter this thing has! But don’t get too close! A monster this size surely has some nasty Area of Effect attacks up its arsenal! So if you happen to get caught in one of those, you are as good as dead!」

「Help! Healing! I need healing! Help me! Help meeeeeeeee!!!!!!」

「Use ranged recovery, for crying out loud! And pray to the RNG gods that you get a solid RNG on those recoveries! You don’t want to get seventeen misses in a row, trust me!」

「I keep on attacking it, but I do not get any response from it……!!!」

「Oh no! Two people already died! This doesn’t look good!」

「Ogogogogogogogo!?」

「Hyiiih!? Keep up the good work, baby! Don’t be discouraged! But don’t let yourselves get killed! If you die yourself, you make it that the five people behind your back are going to soon follow! So be aggressive, but be smart about it!」

Although this thing looks pretty much like an overgrown, fat cat placed in between plates of armor, it is so powerful and durable that if you were to touch it even for a few seconds, even the most powerful and sturdy of Tanks would fall dead towards the ground from the damage such action would cause. And that is without even mentioning its attack patters, some of which including but not being limited to: multi-hit pummeling attack with its armored paws, slashing attacks with its razor-sharp claws, and then there was also a staple for dragon monsters, a breath attack with three different variants and with three different spreads and three different delays between the start of the attack and its actual execution.

While listening to the screams of suffering and dying players all around me, I finally decided to start moving as well. There is still a job in here that need to be done, and no one else is going to do it beside me!

「Alright! Come on now! Fight me, you stupid oversized asshole! Or could it be that you are scared of me!? Like I give a shit about that!」

Then we have another really bizarre and eldritch-looking creature, a monster named Newton Six-Two. At the first glance its mass of tentacles made it look like an octopus or a squid monster, but truth to be told, upon closer inspection one could see that it was a mass of writhing and wiggling worms that was somehow levitating in the air in front of the confused players.

However, instead of moving each and every single one of those tentacles, the number of which was likely to go into the realm of hundreds if not thousands, individually and targeting different players, it was aiming for a more Power-Type of attacks, twisting about ten or so tentacles together into one great mass and bringing it down upon the heads of its victims, or swiping at their feet and knocking them off balance. Getting hit by those things was bound to hurt as all hell, but there was a silver lining in here as well: it had only a few attack patterns, and if you already knew what those patterns were, avoiding them was pretty easy of a thing to accomplish.

Normally this would be a pretty dangerous and undesirable situation if I was forced to fight both Maxwell and Newton at the same time in here, but fortunately enough I was no longer in a situation one versus many. There were other people around me as well, so they could serve as a nice distraction. They surely would not be able to take any of those monsters down on their own, but to server as a meat shield or aggro sponge? They could certainly achieve that without much of a problem. This also allows me to be more flexible with my approach, and plan my strategy accordingly.

So, this creates a certain unique situation: even though the effect of the Luukan’s Wounds makes it easier for me to be targeted by the monsters, I can pretty much be at ease in here and play to my heart’s content with this here Newton while not having to worry all that much about Maxwell…… Yes, this is really awkward, but I can certainly make this work!

Like every other monster that employs tentacles as its weapons of choice, the whole surface of the Newton’s body is all shiny and slimy, as if covered by some sort of secretion, but…… Yeah, this type of secretion makes its whole body really slippery. And we are not talking about normal slippery, we are talking about the kind of slippery that makes weapons unable to strike against its body, which in turn makes it really difficult to utilize my trusty critical hits.

「And unsurprising to no one, this shit is apparently so acidic that it can eat through the weapons like it’s no one’s business, destroying them in an instant……!!」

On top of it all, this monster’s body makes it specialized in Defensive Power, which means that even if Critical Hits were to connect, they would still not be able to do all that much damage, and its sheer size makes it naturally tough and resilient. And your weapons break apart in a manner of seconds when you try to attack it in melee range……!!