Chapter 23: Boss Fight!

There were now over forty mimics waiting for them in the boss room. Thomas wondered if there had been that many originally and Zach had just gone on a burning spree earlier—likely—or if the boss had figured out that the two of them would return and had doubled the amount.

Either way, it was a large room, so even that many mimics didn’t make it feel crowded, but it would be daunting if they all decided to attack at once.

Oh yes, and the faces of the mimics had changed to those of Zach and Thomas.

Though Zach still looked like his old volcano demon self, which was interesting. It meant that the boss couldn’t see what was going on outside of this room. It probably didn’t know their plan.

Thomas closed the door and turned back to Zach. “Okay.” He quickly explained the situation, adding, “You have full permission to kill me.”

“And myself, I guess,” Zach said. “I promise to try to make it quick and painless.”

“I don’t know why it bothered to change the mimics to our faces.” Thomas frowned. “The only reason I can tell what’s going on is through my healing sight. It has to know that we can’t see anything.”

“Oh right, I forgot to tell you — this darkness is totally not natural,” Zach said. “It was definitely added to the dungeon later on.”

“What?!” he exclaimed. “You could have mentioned that before.”

“Sorry, bro.”

Thomas exhaled and reminded himself that it really wasn’t important right now. Well, it was important, but they had a job to do and couldn’t get distracted.

“Alright,” Thomas said. “Are you ready?”

Zach readjusted his grip on the katana. “Nope,” he said. “Let’s do this.”

They walked into the room. Almost immediately, one of the Thomases stepped forward. It seemed that this version wasn’t just going to stand there to be passively killed like the previous mimics.

“Straight ahead, two steps, then on your nine o’clock,” Thomas said tensely.

Zach obeyed his instructions, stepping forward and bringing the sword down in a controlled diagonal sweep that cut the fake Thomas completely in half. It splashed into mimic goo.

Meanwhile, Thomas made a show of backing up until his shoulders hit the nearest wall. “I’m going to call these out from a safe place,” Thomas said, probably a little too loudly. “This dungeon boss can’t keep spawning these things forever. You probably weakened it with all the ones you killed before.”

“Heard,” Zach said.

“Great. Three steps forward, then stab directly ahead.”

Zach complied, and with a quick twist that for some reason created a breeze, he killed a false Zach mimic in the same way. Thankfully, the false-Zach hadn’t tried to fire blast him.

Thomas conveniently didn’t mention that the mimics he destroyed were instantly replaced by others. As he directed Zach to kill one after another, Thomas moved to the far left wall and made sure to direct Zach followed a killing path that seemed to randomly take them toward the back left as well.

It was going swimmingly right up to the point where the mimics stopped being quite so passive. They waited until Zach was right in the middle of them.

Then one of the fake Thomases shouted in an exact replica of his voice: “No wait, I’m not fake!” He held up his hands. “Zach, stop!”

Zach visibly twitched and took a half-step back, but his sword strike was already in motion, and it cut across the fake Thomas’s throat. The fake Thomas made some truly terrible sputtering sounds as it died.

“That was a fake Thomas,” real Thomas called helpfully.

“No wait, I’m not a fake,” said another fake Thomas, about eight feet from Zach’s right.

“Nope, kill that one,” Thomas said.

“No, don’t!” the fake Thomas cried, just before Zach’s sword swept through him.

Now all the mimics were shifting to resemble Thomases, and they started babbling different directions at the man — some giving him bad advice, while others were straight up begging for their lives. Thomas wasn’t quite sure why they weren’t fighting back, but he suspected this was a prelude to an actual attack.

The mimic boss probably figured they were good at fighting their way through, which was why they had made it down here in the first place. So it had shifted to trying to burn Zach out. And now, seeing that he was clearly the greater threat of the two, it was attempting to throw him off balance psychologically. Once Zach was on his back foot, the next phase would be a physical attack.

Somehow, Zach was able to push past the noise. He went into a whirlwind, the air whipping around him sharply enough to cause little cuts on the fake Thomases, while his sword extended out to give him space.

Now that Zach could not tell real from fake and had decided to go into attack mode, Thomas moved into a safe corner, one he pretended he didn’t know was occupied by the boss.

Give the boss one thing: it was completely dedicated to the shtick of hiding. It didn’t so much as twitch as Thomas drew closer, though of course Thomas watched it out of the corner of his eye.

It was an ugly son of a bitch. Basically, it was a big blob standing on about five stick-like feet, with featureless human-shaped heads protruding from its shoulders. His Combat Foresight caught the moment just before the blob opened its middle horizontally to reveal teeth, ready to snap down on Thomas.

So Thomas struck first.

He’d been saving his penknife dagger throughout this dungeon.

It was so small that it was ridiculous, so he didn’t blame the mimic for not flinching back as Thomas brought it around and stabbed it deep. He wasn’t even sure if it would work himself, but it had killed level one bosses before.

For a second, Thomas saw a horrific ghostly image of future teeth snapping down on top of him. But there was a whistling scream, and that image shifted and fell apart like a breaking mirror. One hit, and the penknife dagger had killed the boss.

He only got a second of warning before an epic amount of goo splashed all over him. “God!” Thomas yelled, disgusted and frustrated. “Why?”

“Uh… Thomas? Real Thomas?” Zach asked.

Thomas looked around and realized all the other mimics were gone. Apparently, they just disappeared when the boss died.

“Yeah, it’s me.” He lifted his leg with a squelch, grimacing. He was now knee-deep in the stuff. “The real me.”

There was a pause.

“How do I know it’s the real you?” Zach asked suspiciously.

Thomas squelched again, trying to find the edge of the deep goo puddle. “You just killed like 20 mimics, plus everything else you burned out before this,” he snapped, his disgust making him irritated. “Go loot what you can.”

“Yep, that’s you.” Zach lowered his sword, then gazed around blindly. “It would be a lot easier if I could see.”

“Yeah, no kidding,” Thomas muttered. He had half hoped that the darkness would lift when the boss died. But nope. Also, he suddenly realized they had no way of finding the dungeon’s exit door without blindly stumbling around in this giant room in the dark. Ugh, he hated this place.

“Tell me about the darkness,” he said. “Someone made the dungeon like this?”

“Yeah. No way this is normal for a level one, and I’ve heard it’s possible to alter dungeons. It’s really, really dangerous because doing it the wrong way can make them unstable.” Zach made an exploding gesture with his hands. “I heard that some of it was blamed on government testing of bomb sites.”

“Yeah, but how do they do it?”

“Usually some high-powered object, I think. Or like a curse?”

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

“Curses are a thing?”

“When the System is involved, a lot of things are a thing,” Zach said wisely.

Thomas had finally sloshed himself free from the boss goo. Unfortunately, he hadn’t encountered any loot along the way. It had to be somewhere, but the only thing Thomas’s health sight showed was Zach. Finding all the loot in this room was going to take forever.

Thomas straightened, closing his eyes. “Let me try something.”

It seemed to him that since he had taken in Adaptation mana — though certainly not as much as Zach — he should be able to adapt his healing sight to other things. It was a stab in the dark, but he had not gone through all this just to walk away from good loot.

He cleared his mind and pushed out with his healing sight… and still saw only Zach.

Well, learning to see mimics hadn’t exactly been easy either.

Thomas tried to will himself to see differently, but it was about as easy as trying to see the color blue while staring at a ripe orange. He ended up just pushing his healing sight out more. But then, on the edge of his perception, he felt a flicker.

“There’s something here,” he said.

Zach turned from where he’d been shuffling around and immediately snapped his sword back up into a ready position. “What?”

“I don’t know,” Thomas said. “It’s in the wall. Right by where the boss had been standing.”

Which meant he had to slosh back into the deep goo. Joy.

Zach wandered over and also made a sound of disgust when he stepped into the goo. It had a pudding-like consistency, so it wasn’t spreading out across the floor and thinning out very quickly.

Thomas was running his hand over the wall, nudging his health mana aside to show him anything else that was useful. Was this a hidden boss? All he saw was a glowing blob, indistinct — a little like seeing heat through one of those infrared goggles.

And he was starting to get a headache. He suspected he might finally be tapping out the reserves of his health and adaptation mana. There weren’t nearly as many free-flowing motes in his body as there had been before. He’d either have to take in another mana crystal of both or wring out his core for more of this stuff. But he thought he had enough for this one last push.

“There’s definitely something in here,” he said, his hand against the wall. “I don’t feel anything, though.”