The first part of a boss floor is basically the same as the last floor, although frequently they dial up any traps just to screw with you. It isn't exactly designed to suck out all your health before the boss fight, and there's a place to rest before the fight, but it is kind of a "screw you three levels aren't enough time to explore this biome theme" kind of thing.

In this case, floor 4 of Armand Bayou became a labyrinth on the inside of an M.C. Escher-esque space-warping cube. I briefly hoped I would be able to fly out the ceiling and across to where I could see the party, but they added some kind of invulnerable glass ceiling as a "no cheating" mechanic.

There was one significant difference between me and the party, though. The Devil's Garbage-Ass Trash Sword gave me True Seeing. It was at a ridiculously low level, of course--which made me wonder if perhaps it really was an ability that damn powerful--but rather than being a skill or an aura, it was a class feature. Why the hell the administrator did it that way, I have no idea, but I just kind of knew that some of the signs on the labyrinth walls were lies.

That should have made it easy to catch up, but apparently they were in some kind of rush. Although I should have been less than an hour behind them, once you figured in fights against the helicopter wraiths and their payloads, I simply didn't catch up to the party before they got to the boss. I tried; I really did. Because of the way boss fights work, once they went in, the door was locked until they finished and the boss respawned, which was an hour's wait on top of the fighting time.

There were two things that really upset me in the boss room, and only one of them was the boss itself. No... the other wasn't a dead Louise. She was still technically in my party, and I would have known earlier if she'd died. It was, however, a dead human.

Let's start at the beginning.

The boss room was inside a spherical arena where gravity was always pulling you towards the outer walls. A bunch of scaffolding was built "up" towards the center of the sphere, where there was a clear spatial distortion of some kind. Strangely enough, to my eyes, that spatial distortion was also labelled as an entrance to a Fairy Dungeon, but... okay. I'd been told not to even consider it, so I didn't.

There was a human corpse item hanging out right there by that distortion. Corpse items lost durability fairly slowly, but could be damaged. You only got a "perfect corpse" of anything, human or monster, by solo-killing it, in which case it would go straight to your inventory. Time spent outside inventory space degraded it, and if a monster dropped a corpse, it would go straight from perfect to "intact", the next lower grade. Low durability meant problems reviving the character, including a chance of failure. This body was Intact, which meant it was fresh. It was very clearly the mage from the party of five.

The fact that a back-row caster had been killed immediately made me stop standing still, which was a good thing.

Out of the spatial distortion came a nightmare red-skinned boar at least four stories tall. It fired out from the center of the space like an arrow, mouth open, and it snapped its teeth about where my head would have been, although its giant boar tusks smashed into the walls, preventing it from getting any closer than that.

The name of the monster was "Supergiant pygmy black hole trapdoor dire boar (hellfire variant)".

"Fuck you, Administrator," I yelled into the room. "If it's a super-giant it's not a fucking pygmy anything and you know it!"

No response, not that I was expecting the Administrator to appear in the middle of a fight.

The attack patterns of the boar were pretty clear, pretty quickly. "Trapdoor" meant that it lived inside the black hole and emerged to attack. The hellfire variant meant that whenever it acted, gobs of hotter-than-fire fire would just kind of splurb out around the edges and rain down over the area. Aside from the insane acceleration it achieved on the initial attack, it was actually pretty slow, but while it was retreating back into its nest, it would also breathe hellfire from its nose and waggle its head in a vain attempt to bludgeon me with the side of its tusks.

I've had harder boss fights by far. Heck, some of the encounters in the previous floors were harder, although that first attack might easily have been lethal if I wasn't warned about it. The only tricky thing was getting close enough to retrieve the corpse item without getting eaten, burned, bludgeoned, or caught in the maybe-black-hole maybe-fairy-dungeon candy center to the arena, but I managed to do it before it got hit by too many tiny bits of hellfire. After that, I crushed the first form pretty easily; the supergiant boar had big ol' eyes for stabbing, and once blinded, it would just kind of impatiently charge at any loud noise instead of targeting me directly.

At half health, it transitioned to a second phase in which several portals opened up around the edges of the arena, and any one of them could be where he emerged from next. Again, the real danger was that I might have fallen in a hole during the transition, but I was levitating at that moment. I could also see how this phase would have likely been the death of a back-liner; if they got sniped from behind, they'd likely eat it pretty badly. Or... end up getting eaten, anyway.

And then if the corpse got dropped in the center... without their magic caster, it must have been impossible to retrieve the corpse. None of the platforms got close.

Anyway, there was more of a risk now that I could be ambushed from many directions, but something about the True Seeing or Cursed Truth Aura buffs gave me a hint as to where the monster would attack from next, and so the rest of the battle wrapped up pretty easily for me, even if it took some time to get through its tough defense. The drop was impressive, but nothing to write home about:

[ TRAPDOOR BOAR HELLFIRE NEGA-KNUCKLES - Lv 40 ] [ STR +5 ] [ DEX +5 ] [ TAI CHI SAVANT Lv 3 ] [ NEGATIVE AURA Lv 5 ] [ HELLFIRE AURA Lv 10 ] [ TEN-YARD PUNCH Lv 10 ] This unassuming set of black knuckles are meant to hurt people in a very personal manner from very far away.

You are a strange one. Why are you in my dungeon?

Soulforged: Absorb time 2H.

I... I honestly didn't even read the description of the knuckles for a minute, instead glancing at the descriptions for the abilities:

[ TAI CHI SAVANT ] Acts as [ Tai Chi ] [ +5 ]. [ NEGATIVE AURA ] Adds [ Trivial ] [ Negative Energy ] damage to attacks. [ HELLFIRE AURA] Adds [ Minor ] [ Hellfire ] damage to attacks. [ TEN-YARD PUNCH ] Active ability. Moves you to a target within range if you would succeed in attacking it. If you miss, you will be vulnerable for a time.

...and then I looked back and saw the Administrator had not-subtly dropped a direct message to me in the description of the item. Which was weird. I blinked at it for a minute and then looked up at the ceiling (which was, of course, just another floor) and said aloud, "You know, if you wanted to talk to me, you can just do that."

And then I was in a white space again.

It was a subtly different space than ...whatever the fuck Herman called the last administrator, his place. It was a featureless white void except for the very nicely upholstered, pure-white high-backed armchair and settee and the tastefully carved, pure-white coffee table with two pure white teacups with pure white flowers on it, both full of steaming black tea that seemed freshly poured. Standing on top of the settee with her hands behind her back was a large, maybe 300-pound-ish woman with very long black hair with blue fringes, which hung down straight and almost completely covered her face in typical shut-in fashion. Her clothes had a floral pattern to them, and were vaguely loose, but not nearly as loose as the beanpole's. She was barefoot, and her toenails were painted blue with pink flames on them. She stood there, on top of the upholstered furniture, unmoving as though that was simply who she was and what she was doing, rather than (more likely) because she just wasn't paying attention to this avatar or didn't care.

My attention was instantly drawn to the tea, and I walked up and picked up a cup and sniffed it. Cinnamon. It was cinnamon tea. I hesitated to try it, not knowing if that would be rude.

"Help yourself," said the woman. "It's just tea."

Considering that my abilities seemed not to work in the whitespace, I simply had to trust that, and tried it. As far as I could tell, it was just tea.

"You have some strange additions to your class," she said. "Why?"

"The Administrator for Pearland and I had a weird relationship," I said simply. I paused. "Not, like, a relationship-relationship. I don't... know what his deal was, honestly." I had another sip of the tea and sat in the armchair. She remained standing on top of the settee.

"He didn't like you." The woman's head turned down slightly towards me, which could have just been because I was now much lower than me, but I got the impression it was supposed to mean something.

"We had a spat," I agreed.

"There is a warning here," she said. "When an Administrator gives any Dungeoneer a True Seeing item or feature, it means they are a radical element. It means you will disrupt things. The other additions to your class... suggest you have done something bad."

"Me?" I put mock offense into my words, while also trying to contain the fear that was slowly trying to gnaw its way out of my chest. "I just ran through the dungeon, a total of three times. If anyone did something wrong, it was him."

She, I think, just stared at me. She could have also just been quiet for a minute. Hard to tell.

"Also," I added as an afterthought, "I obviously can't explain to you what happened, if that's what you were hoping for."

More silence.

"I mean, you do see the note from Herman, right?"

To my eternal horror, the woman in front of me grabbed her sides and shuddered. I had a casual encounter with a creature that makes an Administrator freak the fuck out. Granted, Herman was absolutely horrifying, and I passed out the only time I met him, but...

"Do you intend to mess with my Dungeon?"

"No!" This time, my offense was real. "Look, I'm not some kind of subversive element. I... I used what... Xertswich," I knew I pronounced his name wrong, but didn't care, "gave me and it just so happened he wasn't expecting me to do that. He wasn't prepared for the consequences of what he, himself, set up. I am not here to break anyone's dungeon. Although," I shrugged, "I mean all of us will do desperate things if it means saving our own lives, right? I don't plan to, and I don't think that I will. I promise, I'm not a bad person."

She stared at me, and after a long moment, sighed.

"Okay."

I reappeared in the boss room, and--cognizant of the fact that I had a corpse on me--declined to wait any longer to try to catch up to the party. I exited the opposite side of the arena from where I entered, found the hole to the next floor, and dived in.