The very short version of my first fight with the Marionette is that I mostly won. Obviously, I didn't die, since I was solo diving and I'm still alive to talk about it. But, in all honesty, it was not... an overwhelming success. I mean, it was a success, it's just... well, anyway.

I know that you might think, oh hey, you can hit really hard, pick up tanks, all that stuff--certainly you can beat a big piece of wood, right? Except, even granting that the giant puppet was in fact hollow (as I would later discover), it was still feet thick, deeper than most trees were wide. Now, that raises some serious questions about how the Labyrinthine Star decides what qualifies as damage, since I can legitimately take a warhammer strike to the head as long as the person swinging it is relatively low level--does it work the other way, where you can do something that shouldn't count as damage, but does? Technically... yes.

Also technically, it's possible for me to dodge an eight-hundred-foot trident swung at supersonic speeds. In practice, ho-ly shit.

My main instinct when it came to approaching the Marionette was to bait it and then teleport elsewhere as soon as it committed to an attack. That works, in every way that matters, but what you miss in that tactical assessment is that absolutely everything that fucking puppet did displaced enormous quantities of air--because of its size, when that trident moves, you can measure the displaced air in double-digit multiples of my weight.

So yeah, I got out of the way when the Marionette did kind of a downwards-sword-slash move with his definitely-not-a-sword trident, and I was well clear of the blow when it passed through where I had been, but in the place I appeared, the air was playing catchup to a big low pressure zone behind the swing, and it did its best to move me along with it. The pseudo-telekinetic floating of my Vampiric Cloak wasn't using that air to support my weight, exactly, but there was a moment when I came out of the teleport where I wasn't holding onto the skill like that, and suddenly I was ass over teakettle and not sure why.

Though, again, the Marionette was not an ass-kick boss, it was a joke boss, and so I had long enough to get my bearings, if nowhere near enough time to turn things around, before it retracted the trident and tried to punch me with its other hand. I could, again, get out of the way of that, but being anywhere near where it was while it was moving was like trying to do jumping jacks in the middle of a busy freeway. Sure, I didn't get hit by the car, but everything that passes me is not only a reminder of my imminent, probable death, but also a disconcerting pull moving me away from safety and towards the next oncoming car.

This doesn't even take into account that the Marionette was in no way predictable.

After swinging the trident and trying a punch, the Marionette moved to that showy side-to-side quarterstaff-twirl trick, which I will admit was something of a trick considering its fingers didn't move. That wasn't aimed at me, exactly, so most of the wind effects were local, but the sounds were intimidating as hell, as the ends of the staff were easily breaking the speed of sound in a constant shifting path.

Even so, I took my balls into my own hands and decided to make a break for it when I knew he was distracted, using both the cape and my new teleporting skill to accelerate myself through a gap in his pattern. Instead of making an attack the first moment I could, though, when I landed on the giant puppet's abdomen I used the weird force of the cloak to simulate running on it and charged upwards towards its neck. Meanwhile, I was gathering every enhancement and ability I could think would work as an offensive tool onto the blade of my new sword

Which, again, the new sword didn't feel special to me, even after absorbing it and speccing it out to my own particular desires. I'd bought it through the marketplace, looking only for something level-appropriate and damaging, and it was... a longsword. Its item level was above mine, but no so much that I had to spend more than an hour absorbing it, and it was relatively cheap because while it was a rare boss drop, it wasn't anything like a unique--easily grindable, according to the seller, and if we're being honest, whoever made it made it to be unimpressive. Useful, yes; it had an abnormally high strength bonus for its level, but the abilities weren't good, and the other effects might as well have not been there, for my purposes.

The point is, it was a longsword that widened slightly along the middle half of the blade, give or take, thinning out in the same area so that the mass was about the same, in theory. I'm sure that practically speaking, if you were concerned about blades breaking, that was a terrible idea, but that didn't tend to be a big problem with dungeon loot, and for me in particular it was entirely irrelevant. It wasn't a big imposing sword, it didn't glow (except as Soulforged items normally did, when I didn't turn that off), it didn't make lightning explode out of your eyes when you scored a hit... it was just a pretty good sword.

Throwing a bunch of aura enhancements and my Disintegration Aura skill onto the blade, along with the Cloak, made it feel like the sword had kind of an odd weight to it. As I ran up-ish on the wooden torso towards the neck, I let the tip of the blade drag along the wood, not putting much force on it, and the auras and the edge did scorch the doll, just as you would probably peel off a little bit of wood if you dragged a sharp blade against a tree. It gave me hope that I'd be able to land a solid blow.

I got to the neck--it was a big solid piece of the torso that extended up into a ball-joint for the head--and stabbed into the wood about where the jugular should have been, if trees in the shape of people had veins. The blade, auras going full bore, sunk into the hilt.

And nothing else happened. The puppet didn't even stop twirling its polarm.

I jerked on the sword, and with the auras going, I was able to pull the sword through the wood, leaving behind a jagged cut. I made three cuts in a triangular fashion to carve a chunk out of the skin, and this is where I discovered that the wood was feet thick and also hollow inside. I crawled in, looking around for anything vital that could use a good stabbing, but as far as I could tell, there wasn't any.

It was just, actually, a giant wooden puppet.

Now, I may or may not have been overestimating when I called the puppet a hundred stories tall. The point is, it's fucking giant. My next order of business since I was inside of the thing's neck was to do everything in my power to see if I could cut off its head, which sounds pretty fucking simple when you know that you can cut through its skin. In practice, I had to pull my sword inch by inch through like two hundred feet of three-foot-thick wood. Even suggesting that I was safe inside the puppet--and for all I knew, at some point he'd decide he had dragon's breath and a giant column of flame would ignite somewhere in here--the sheer amount of mana it was taking made me pause after like six feet of progress and reassess. Among all other considerations, this way of dealing with the fight wasn't interesting. It wasn't going to make me stronger, and I wasn't getting to practice riding on the knife's edge of combat.

So I crawled back over to the hole I'd cut and looked back out.

The Marionette, having lost sight of me, was now back to its Elmer Fudd impersonation where it stomped around for a while then turned left and right searching, as it had done when Louise and I were hiding fearfully from it. That told me that the thing wasn't even being fucking hurt, and that was its own kind of insult. Inevitable, perhaps, but it still fucking hurt. I thought about it for a while before looking to Merry, who had been kind of... quiet lately. There was, among the things I bought on the marketplace, one thing she had asked me to get and absorb, and I did, and it had her thinking--we'll get to that later, but the point is, as near as I could tell, she'd been thinking fairy-thoughts that were largely irrelevant to me since then and not really focusing on me going through a dungeon that we were both confident I could handle.

She'd been watching the fight, but I think not really engaging with it much, and when I asked her opinion, she shrugged.

Honestly, bro, you need to remember the stuff you have. I'm pretty sure that the fairy sight skill, or whatever we're going to call the thing I gave you, will help you find a weakness in this big chunky bastard.

I hesitated to use it, but eventually did. It's not like... I didn't appreciate having a whole bunch of extra information about the fight. I guess mostly, I really wanted telekinetic sense back, and it bothered me that this new sense wasn't anything like that. It was kind of like getting an ugly pair of socks as a gift, and even if they're warm and comfortable, on some level you really wish that hadn't been the gift and that you didn't need to feel any obligation to wear them. They just... don't fit you, stylistically, even as you recognize the practical nature of it. And me being fundamentally anti-social, well, it was easy to just not think about things like I didn't feel fit me.

Still, she was right, and I pulled on the skill, soon revealing one thing that had been obvious from the start: there was a whole lot of Dungeon stuff behind this giant wooden doll.

The skill itself liked to show me lines like thread that held everything together, and a big puppet like this was full of thread, and not just the kind that moved its limbs. In general, the wood itself seemed to have a chicken-wire mesh of lines that seemed to power the whole thing, and the cut I'd made had severed maybe three or four lines, with the rest of the cut being empty space. With that in mind, I re-materialized my sword and began stabbing into the wood at the mesh nodes, cutting just enough to sever a set of lines before moving on to the next. It was still a lot of work, but within about twenty minutes, I'd completely severed the dungeon construct lines that held the head to the body.

Which also apparently did fucking nothing. It didn't die, and the head didn't fall off. If anything, the mesh that supported the top section of the neck dimmed, but that was about all.

I finally crawled out of the thing's neck to find it had moved from Elmer Fudd mode to sitting on a hillside The Thinker-style, staring straight at the exit for the level. From what I could see, the head was still healthy--it had a separate 'power source' in the piece of thread holding it up from the sky, just as the limbs did. Truly, it was clear that in theory, that was how I was supposed to win, by severing those threads and making the puppet go slack.

But that was boring and didn't make use of my strengths at all.

A little more looking around convinced me that I could see a few things that were supposed to be critical-hit points on the limbs, where the threads gathered in a single point. The nearest one was the joint of the arm currently holding up the head--it was far below me, now, and so I put my sword away and pulled on my Slenderman gloves. Then, using the Slendersuit's [Crushing Leap] ability--the first time I'd really felt the need to try it, honestly--I hurled myself on what I hoped was a good, direct arc to smash into that exact point.

The Crushing Leap would, according to the skill description, enhance my strength as I descended--and it was probably a hundred, hundred-fifty feet below me. And the gloves' [Chaos Touch] was supposed to release destruction amplified by my strength. They were obviously always supposed to be paired, if perhaps not used like this.

It's probably only because I couldn't help myself yelling like a maniac in the last stretch of the fall that I missed. On the plus side, when the giant puppet jolted and moved his arm, because of how he was sitting that still left me aimed right at his knee, and I just barely managed to catch the edge of another vulnerable spot there. With the item abilities, and my new Disintegration Aura together, my hand smashed into the wood and probably created an impact crater twenty feet in diameter, and that definitely hit the weakpoint, as far as the Dungeon was concerned.

I didn't actually expect Assassination to trigger for that, but it did, and the puppet's knee ball joint shattered, dropping the entire lower leg segment to the ground. Which was also good because the hit didn't exactly completely stop my momentum, and I ended up more or less face-planting into a giant, if now somewhat loose, mass of wood. Some of that momentum transferred over to the leg, saving me a fair bit of disgrace, but it fucking hurt.

I did, with effort, manage to catch myself with the Cloak and hover in midair, grabbing my nose with both hands and trying to make sense of what the hell the situation was as my entire body caught up to the self-own I'd just handed myself.

Move! Merry got my attention in time to avoid a strike from nowhere I was paying attention to, and I just kind of threw myself in whatever direction, avoiding a trident strike to my ass, but not by nearly enough. In true Marionette form, the puppet didn't seem to be slowed down by having only one leg; it was only sort-of walking in the first place, with the lines from above technically holding it up. It made a back-hand swing at me when it recovered from the thrust, and I dodged that, still seeing stars from my swan dive into the walking forest's former limb. It made sense to me, now, that I could probably pull that trick again--if I could sneak up on it. That was reinforced when I checked the puppet's health to find that nearly a fifth of it had vanished when I had torn off the knee--most likely, if you defeated all the limbs, that counted as a success. Considering how little I did with normal damage, I could grudgingly accept that this was the only practical way to win this fight, but at least I wasn't aiming for the wires, at least not where they were in open air.

I flew and teleported my way back into a blind spot on the Marionette's shoulder, and repeated the trick with an arm as soon as it became predictable. Again, though I only just barely managed to hit the vulnerable spot, the damage with the active abilities on the high-level equipment combined with Assassination, it was a complete coup in terms of limb removal--and this time, I even managed not to high-five the thing with my face on the way past, though I did kind of body-slam it.

Perhaps more interestingly to me, as I fell past the arm, I realized I might just have a shot at the leg as I went by. I missed the critical hit by a lot, just based on speed and angle of my movement, but but the Chaos Touch still left an enormous impact crater.

What happened next only made sense after the fact.

I flew away and turned to face the puppet, which was hopping mad at having lost another limb, by which I mean he jumped up and down and flailed his head and arm around in an obvious temper tantrum. Then, with a sudden and powerful flick, he threw his head back as through to yell at the sky, except that there was a terrible crack, and his head flew backwards off his body, leaving behind a shattered neck.

I stared at it for a while before realizing that after I had cut the Dungeon energy lines in the neck, whatever power was making the wood stronger than, you know, real wood would have vanished. And the puppet, strong as it was, was really abusing its power to show off its mad thespian skills. The head itself had to be tons and tons of wood, and it was thrown around with complete disregard for momentum, and that apparently had taken its toll.

That left a torso hanging in midair with an arm and a leg, plus stumps for the other two limbs that hung loosely. And yet, somehow, that was enough for it to still not be dead, because it started hopping at me, angrily. Or, I would quickly discover, hopping at the last place it had seen me. It didn't change direction when I moved out of the way, and it didn't even seem to notice when it flew right off the edge of the island. I breathed a sigh of relief, but not for long--because apparently, like the maze that surrounded us, the island had two sides, and when the puppet went over the edge, it just transitioned to the back side of the island. I could hear it stomp-stomping around on the underside, and a few moments later, it reappeared on another edge, swinging back up from underneath in a way that definitely didn't make any sense at all.

As you might imagine, the fight didn't take all that much longer.

When the Marionette lost all its limbs, it still had a little bit of a health pool left over. The final answer appeared quickly, though--a big pair of wooden doors opened in its chest, showing a big heart-shaped heart beating around where the heart should be. With Merry's vision skill active, I could see that the heart hadn't been there before--it, and the weaknesses around it, all appeared as soon as the torso flopped over onto the ground. I flew over to it, examining the giant pulsating thing, only to discover to my confusion that the heart wasn't actually made of wood at all--but neither was it made of flesh. I squinted, knowing that this was all incredibly stupid, and leaned in, dragging a finger across the heart and touching it to my tongue.

"Is this... candy?" It was, at the very least, incredibly pure sugar.

Only the thumping of the heart answered me, so I smashed it, and pressurized sugary water sprayed out at me, leaving me with the distinct taste of cola on my lips and an uncomfortable stickiness all over my body. This was, I suppose, exactly the sort of situation in which you'd normally not want to be a solo killer--as soon as I won, the corpse disappeared, and loot appeared inside of me. Under the circumstances, though, I was happy to be finally done with it, and I checked my inventory to see what the loot was.

This time, at least, I could smirk at the humor of it, in part because there was nobody else around to witness me giving into the silly, punny nature of the stupid fucking Administrator.

[ TITANIC TOY TREANT'S TASTY TITANIUM TRIDENT - Lv 150 ] [ FOOL ] [ STRENGTH +30 ] [ STAMINA +20 ] [ THESPIAN CURSE - Lv 50 ] [ VARIABLE WEIGHT - Lv 75 ] [ CANDY RATIONS - Lv 50 ] [ PRESTIDIGI-TOY-TION - Lv 150 ]

Wow, you really just can't do things the easy way, can you? And to think you said you weren't here to screw up my dungeon. Liar, liar.

Soulforged: Absorb time 7D

[ VARIABLE WEIGHT ] Active Ability. You can change the weight from 1/10x to 10x the original weight. [ CANDY RATIONS ] A sugary treat is produced by this item whenever it kills a Dungeon creature. Treats are stored within the shaft of the trident, and can be summoned at will. [ PRESTIDIGI-TOY-TION ] Fool's Marked. This ability can activate a number of other skills and abilities given these situational triggers: [ NON-VIOLENT ] [ HUMOR ] [ PUBLIC ] [ USER: FOOL ] [ THESPIAN CURSE ] Curse. The user may find themselves required to speak or act in unusual ways while using this item.

"I love you too, Administrator," I said to the air above me, and wandered my way over to the hole that led to the next town.