Bonded Summoner

“Didn’t I say to stack more dots? Why are there only six dots on the boss right now?!”

Jake rolled his eyes as he added a damage over time spell to the boss, acquiescing to the raid leader’s stupid demands. Jake’s mana was more effectively used on just about anything else, but if it would make the guy stop yelling he would waste it on something he was not specialized in. Jake was annoyed, but he couldn’t help but be excited as he faced the challenging boss with a group of people.

Jake healed the small Dwarven Siegebreaker as he tanked the giant Infernal Demon around the room, the dichotomy between the two beings amusing him. While damage over time effects could be a viable strategy for a target that constantly went in and out of range for damage dealers, this was nothing more than a tank and spank.

There was just something about Massively Multiplayer Online Games, or MMOs, that always attracted Jake. Something about working as a team, each character progressing in their own special ways, really motivated Jake to spend most of his available free time ever since he was a teenager.

Despite enjoying playing his favorite game with his numerous friends, he was starting to feel like something was missing. The sense of accomplishment was diminishing, and the enjoyment of supporting others was limited by both their enthusiasm to play the game or to improve as much as Jake.

Jake’s primary character was the Summoner class in the game, [The Labyrinth]. Often considered the jack of all trades, master of none class, in Jake’s opinion it was the ultimate support. Using the advantages of various summons, it could win any game of paper-rock-scissors; especially with the amount of effort Jake put into each and every one of his summoned creatures so that they would be available in case they were needed.

His summons could buff, they could heal, they could tank, they could bring any damage type that benefitted against a boss, and more. This was on top of all the things that Jake himself could do: the only things he couldn’t do on his own without his summons was tank a boss or bring sufficient melee damage to the fight.

Thanks to this, Jake was no longer just a jack of all trades, master of none; he was the master of supporting his allies to bring out the best in them, being just what his party needed, and he enjoyed this very much. However, it looked like the game of [The Labyrinth] was out of easy to complete content, and many of his friends have lost motivation to gear up, skill up, and complete some of the final raids of the game. It was because of that, that Jake had bothered to team up with this group of man-children.

The Summoner class had various specialization choices, and Jake had chosen to focus on buffing for his spells and for his creature focus he chose no-focus. This gave a minor benefit to any summoned creature that might have been less than picking other specialties like dragons, elementals, or beasts, but he would not receive any penalties to bringing different creatures, or using different summon types, allowing him much more versatility than any of those. He went through all the effort to collect and earn many rare summons, to have the best of those available to him; to have an answer to almost any situation.

That situation was about to happen. His raid party of ten players was facing off against the giant Infernal Demon, for the fourth time tonight. It was probably the second to last attempt before his raid party called it quits for the night. At ten percent health, the demon was supposed to unleash a wave of hell-fire that would wash over the party, but they had not been able to reach that point on previous attempts. A few classes had ways of mitigating this particular ability, but their specializations were often less desirable and they had been hard-pressed to form this group in the first place. Other classes could avoid it for themselves only, but that would require them both paying attention and saving such ability for that precise moment.

Jake had a solution, and this was the only reason they were here facing this boss in the first place. He shared over the voice chat “Get ready. Placing Wartortoise in the center like planned in ten seconds.” As his internal timer counted down, he noticed that nobody in his group had bothered to head there; too focused on trying to maximize their damage to beat their team-mates on a damage chart.

He knew that this train-wreck was about to happen, so he initiated his plan: finish the boss by himself. He knew that even the one-off abilities that would allow the party members to save themselves would end up not being triggered at the right time by his party members, or at least successfully by enough of them to win. Jake grinned, as he realized that the raid leader’s incessant focus on dots might actually be what makes this possible for Jake.

Jake finished summoning the [Asmodian Wartortoise] with only a few moments to spare. With the spare time, he began initiating his plan. He drank mana potions, he placed his mana font, and began summoning his other creatures he would need to make the impossible happen.

The Infernal Demon released its wave of hell-fire encompassing the entire battlefield, and Jake did his best to heal through the large amount of damage over time by those hit by the wave of hell-fire, but it only delayed the inevitable and gave his allies just a few more seconds of damage against the boss; damage that he needed. The entire time his “friends” raged in the voice chat, blaming others for their own failure. The boss was now down to seven percent health and enraged.

Jake was completely safe from the damage hiding behind the Wartortoise, as the activated ability created a barrier that protected those behind the giant turtle in relation to the boss, forming a powerful shell of water around itself. The turtle still took the damage, and Jake’s plan was going to utilize this, as he had activated a second ability: [Wartortoise’s Rage].

The more damage the turtle took in the time the first ability was active, the more damage it would be able to accomplish with the second. It just took an unreasonable amount of damage, so this turtle was particularly pissed.

As the angry turtle took on the boss, Jake was casting his much longer cast-time summons. Normally, the boss would still have Jake on its threat table, causing them to come after Jake before the turtle because of all the healing that Jake had done throughout the raid: more than anyone else in his party. However, once again Jake had a plan for this: he had summoned a [Sharkgoblin Assassin].

This would normally be a useless summon in this situation, but he had found that when the goblin had access to water, exactly like the water given off by the turtle, it could create a domain in which it could spread and share its stealth ability with Jake and his allies, taking him off of the Infernal Demon’s threat table. Jake loved interactions like these, and found that there were many few players even knew about, due to just how many creatures there were in the game: tens of thousands.

A Beast or Humanoid Summoner could not take advantage of this particular combination, because the penalties involved would simply not allow access to both abilities; summons outside their respective specialization couldn’t have access to all their abilities. This was not the case for Jake’s no-focus specialization. Sure, the beast summoner’s Wartortoise would be even stronger and better than his, but then the Sharkgoblin would be unable to interact with it in this way.

The turtle was nearly dead, and Jake released his next summon: [Swarm of Vicious Blight-filled Mayflies], and once again downed more potions and started on his next. Jake was unable to use this summon during a raid under normal circumstances. Swarms for the Summoner class could be exceedingly powerful, but they came with one major downside: they did not follow the will of the summoner. In other words, they were now attacking both his turtle and the boss. Jake was only safe due to being inside the domain the goblin created.

The mayflies had several effects. Their bites and claws were filled with blighted diseases and poisons that stacked, reducing both the health and effectiveness of the boss. The best part though, was that these actually extended his dead team member’s damage over time effects, allowing them to help Jake from the grave. This would be a terrible idea to use with his party still alive, as these effects would probably hurt them a lot more than the boss, but Jake was able to do this because they were all dead.

Most importantly, Jake summoned the mayflies for their final effect: when they died, their bodies would explode and release an acid that would add even more damage, and sunder the enemy’s armor. Jake’s turtle died, his valiance forever remembered, and he would only have but a few moments before the intelligence of the boss decided to release another area of effect to both find and kill Jake.

This Boss did not much care to target swarming enemies, as they would die on their own to the boss’s hell-fire aura. A shame, Jake thought. He would have to farm for hours to collect so many mayflies again. Unlike his other summons that he would simply need to revive at a temple, swarming creatures just didn’t have the same type of connection to the summoner, and when they died or were used, they would have to be captured again. Still, this was the only path that Jake saw for victory.

With that, Jake released his second to last summon: another humanoid. This time, it was a [Korstrazi Blademaster]. The Korstrazi come from a world nearly infested with demons; there is nothing they hate more. Because of that, they have become extremely proficient in killing them. Not only that, they use blights and poisons to great effect. The Korstrazi appeared only to find the object of his hatred right in front of him.

The blade-master immediately charged the Infernal Demon and used even more blights and poisons, enhancing the ones already present on the boss. With the boss’s armor sundered, the blade-master’s damage was quite impressive. The blade-master had various attacks that were boosted by how many diseases and poisons were on the boss, which thanks to the mayflies were quite numerous.

With the boss enraged, even with the Korstrazi’s natural advantage against demons, he would be dead within a few swings of the Infernal Demon’s giant axe. However, blade-masters specialize in evasion, and they had an ability they could use only one time per ten minutes that allowed them to become near unhittable for thirty seconds. This allowed Jake to make his final preparation, as the boss’s hit-points dipped down to two-percent. The blade-master would die in mere moments as their evasion ability would wear off soon.

The entire time Jake fought his one on one with the boss, the raid party raged at him over the voice chat. They wanted him to hurry up and wipe so that they could make another attempt on the boss; they did not think that Jake would win, and that he was merely showing off. He was even threatened that they would not invite him back for future runs.

Jake knew from past experience that they were just mad that they thought they were not going to be able to get the loot from the boss for all their hard work. They couldn’t usually care less how or why the killing blow against the boss was achieved, if they could simply walk into the room and get loot they would gratefully accept it and move on. Jake just ignored their childishness and replied “Just wait a minute guys. I will resurrect you when I am done.” They would get their precious loot, thanks to Jake.

Jake cast his rarely used ephemeral summon: a [Blighted Dragon]. Casting this creature took up nearly all of his mana, and this was why it was rarely used. It was a type of summon that would execute only one attack or ability before disappearing, like a certain fantasy game that was considered final, yet there were like twenty of them. It was simply not efficient to blow nearly all of his mana for a single attack, and it was usually much better to cast several other longer duration summons over a period. Jake was only able to keep his mana so high doing what he was doing because he had laid down the mana-font, and had kept his mana as full as possible.

The reality is, this legendary artifact called a mana-font was reason enough for Jake to get added to the raid by itself. He spent countless days farming and hunting down what was needed to make this item, all so that it would regenerate mana by those near it, even during combat. Mana would hardly regenerate at all in combat, aside from his Summoner class and random buffs or abilities, so stacking this mana-font allowed his mana regeneration to reach unprecedented levels.

If his party had simply followed his plan, it would have been like a reset of the fight as the other casters and healers could have regenerated most, if not all of their mana, and even if the boss had nearly double the total hit-points, they still would have won. They could only blame themselves for not being where they needed to be.

With that, the blade-master died and the Dragon released its blighted breath attack as it disappeared into motes of light. Once again, the blight added and fed on the blights already present on the boss, and it took an immense amount of damage, and added even more damage-over-time effects. The boss was already dead, it just didn’t know it yet. Jake sent in his goblin friend that protected him the whole time, and it released its empowered backstab, killing the Infernal Demon.