Black Manor was a bit of a misnomer. It was entirely possible that the gang of brigands and assassins had used a place worth of that name sometime in the past, but their current residence was an old dilapidated two-story farm house. Calling it dilapidated might be generous.

From their position 30 meters away, Kana could count at least three NPCs inside the house. Spiral had assured him that there were more. That thought was worrying, mostly because the NPCs that he could see had a distinct difference in their HP bars from anything else he’d fought.

They had a normal green bar, but there were three small circles next to it, which Spiral told him was because they were considered elite monsters that had much higher than normal amounts of HP for their levels. If there had only been one of them, he might not have worried about it, but the party’s primary means of handling large groups of enemies had been overwhelming offensive power.

If Kana couldn’t cut them down fast enough that Spiral didn’t run out of HP before they got the numbers under control, the whole strategy fell apart. Valit would really only keep two targets slowed down at once, and that tactic had been becoming less and less effective as they ran into stronger opponents. Against something that had an official elite designation, he was concerned that they’d be overwhelmed.

“Can we split them up and take them one at a time?” Valit asked.

“This would be so much easier with a monk or a conjurer in the group,” Spiral said. “We’ve got a decent balance going, but we’re sorely lacking in support.”

“Maybe Exodus will walk by and help us again,” Kana deadpanned.

“I’d rather take our chances at doing it ourselves and risk dying.”

Valit checked the house again. “What are we waiting for? If we’re not going to be able to do this quest now, why not go do something else and come back at a higher level?”

“We just need the right opportunity. Since we can’t brute force it, we’re waiting for one of them to leave so we can thin the numbers.”

“But how long is that going to take? Standing here staring at an old junky house is boring.”

“Should be any minute now.”

The three waited in silence. Kana just stared at the house. Spiral poked through menus and read some message boards. Valit paced back and forth. Occasionally she walked off a short distance to fry some random monster that had spawned or roamed too close. The first time an assassin spawned on top of her and attacked her, she gave that up and returned to the group.

“Try to think of it like a stakeout,” Spiral advised her.

“Bring a dry snack and nothing to drink,” Kana said absently, not taking his eyes off the house. “I’ve got movement inside.”

One of the NPCs had gotten to his feet and exited the house through the back door. He headed to the edge of the yard and if the game wasn’t exactly explicit, his stance and the relieved sigh he let out made it obvious what he was doing.

“Circle around, we need to get to him while he’s still, uh… occupied,” Spiral said.

The NPC must have had a large bladder, because he was still standing there when they got within striking distance a minute later. Spiral struck first, popping up around the tree and stunning the NPC, then shoving him backwards behind out of sight of the house. Kana was there, waiting with Nibelus, and by the time the NPC, whose HP bar was labeled as black manor poisoner, managed to fight back, they’d already depleted one of his bars and were half way through the second.

It was a short, one-sided battle. Unfortunately, it also illustrated that Spiral was exactly correct in his assessment that they needed a healer on their team if they wanted to storm the house. Already half dead, the NPC had managed to take a third of Spiral’s HP by himself and leave him with two different debilitating effects that halted his stamina regeneration and slowed him down.

“The thing is there will be other kind of elites in there,” Spiral said. “This one wasn’t an armored soldier type, so it had weak defense and low HP. That’s why it went down so quickly. If we go in at full HP, I’d guess we might be able to fight two at once and win. Three would almost certainly kill at least one of us.”

“Well, we get clever, I guess. There were three on the ground floor, right? That means there are two left, and maybe we can take them both, but probably not before reinforcements show up.”

“You want to draw them out somehow? Will the AI allow it?”

“It does, actually. The way we did this the first time was we started like this, and when this one doesn’t come back, it triggers the other two to get suspicious and start looking around. One of them goes down into the cellar to report or whatever, and the other one is alone. We can overwhelm that one the same way.”

“Doesn’t that put the ones in the cellar on guard though?” Valit asked.

Spiral shrugged. “Doesn’t make much difference in game terms though. We can’t really ambush them anyway. The best we can do is split them up and pick them off, and that’s never an option for the cellar group.”

“How were you planning on winning that fight then?” Kana asked. “You said you had a plan.”

“Yep. Choke point. There’s two ways in. I’m going to stand at one of them and protect Valit while she snipes. You’re going to the other one to either take out Malia when she flees or back us up once we’ve whittled down their numbers enough to advance into the cellar.”

“Oh, I get it. The whole plan depends on them being pinned down with no backup to push out of position from behind. That’s pretty clever.”

“Thanks. I’d like to take credit for it, but I was the sniper in this plan last time we did it. It worked pretty well too.”

“Oh yeah,” Valit said. “I thought you said you had another character. What class did you play?”

“Ranger.”

“That makes sense. You seemed to know a lot about them.”

“Yeah, I made it to- hey! There they go, one down the stairs. Time to move in.”

Spiral didn’t wait for a response, which left Kana and Valit no choice but to follow. The status effects from the previous fight hadn’t worn off yet, but Spiral didn’t seem to care. He rushed in and attacked the NPC, making sure to position himself between the man and the stairway leading down into the cellar.

Kana flanked the NPC and they worked to tear him down. Unlike the first elite they fought, this one was a front-line combatant and both tougher and more durable. Instead of the 50 to 60 damage he was expecting to do with his attacks, Kana found himself doing about 35 to 40. Arc lance still hit for full damage, so he guessed that his target was resistant to physical attacks.

Valit’s flashburn beams were helping, but Spiral’s HP was dipping low despite him successfully blocking the majority of the NPC’s attacks. That made sense, since it was known as a black manor shock trooper. One of the status effects fell off mid-combat, which helped slow but not stop Spiral’s HP from going into the red.

They took the second HP bar off the shock trooper, which prompted him to shift tactics. His defense rating shot up so that Kana’s attacks were doing even less damage, barely 20 per hit. Even arc lance, when it came back up again, only hit for half what it had been. The tradeoff was that the shock trooper did even less damage, so they did manage to whittle its HP away to nothing before Spiral died.

“Is there some way I can switch with you?” Kana asked after. “I’m at full HP here. I could have taken a few hits for you.”

“Kind of, but not really. You know how your whole class revolves around chaining attacks together, and you can’t even do half of your stuff if you don’t use other abilities first? Same with the knight. A lot of my attacks aren’t usable if my target is attacking someone else, so I have other abilities designed to redirect attacks to me and later I’ll get some that let me give debuffs to the mob if it’s not attacking me, but not right now at level 7.”

“What are we going to do then? You’re out of the fight for at least the next few minutes and if we don’t keep pushing forward, we’re going to be fighting our way back out too.”

“You still have that healing potion you got yesterday?” Spiral asked.

“Oh, yeah.” Kana pulled it from his inventory and handed it to Spiral. It restored about half of his missing health over ten seconds, which was better than Kana had expected from it. Considering he’d gotten it at level one, he would have thought it would be good for 50 HP at the most. It had to have done close to triple that in healing though.

“Head around to the cellar door outside the house and give me a minute. We’ll attack from here. There will be four guards of some flavor or another and Malia. If we’re real lucky, she’ll send all of them against me and you can solo her when she runs.”

“That seems unlikely to happen,” Kana said.

“Yeah, it didn’t work last time either. But we had more people and put two on the outside door so we penned them in.”

Kana thought Spiral might be giving the game’s AI too much credit. If the quest was to find and kill the master assassin of Black Manor, he didn’t expect she would run. If she was supposed to run, it would be like when they’d fought those thugs and the game had cheated to keep them alive. But he knew when he was out of his depth and should trust the expert. That’s why he’d asked Spiral if he wanted to play together in the first place.

He circled around the outside of the house until he found the cellar door, all the while keeping a running count in his head. When he reached one minute, he threw the door open and was immediately peppered by numerous darts. Four new status effects showed up on his HUD, telling him that his HP regeneration had been halved, his movement speed had been halved, his stamina regeneration had been completely halted, and his damage output was down by 25%. All of them had a duration of ten minutes.

To add insult to injury, he lost 26 HP from the trap. He didn’t have time to consider the potential ramifications of that though, since opening the door had triggered one of the NPCs in the cellar to notice him and attack. It was a shock trooper, and fortunately for Kana that was the only enemy to come up the stairs at him. That still left four more for Spiral and Valit though, if their count was right.

Dodging the shock trooper’s attacks was much harder than Spiral had made it look. Part of that was that it didn’t have the slowing effect from Valit’s spells, but a larger part was that he didn’t have a shield. At first, he just focused on finding his rhythm and not taking any damage, but then he realized that the poison that had rendered him unable to regenerate his stamina meant there was a finite limit to the amount of time he could spend in combat before he was simply unable to move anymore.

That meant he had to get aggressive, which meant relying heavily on Nibelus for an outrageous damage output and hoping he could survive longer than the elite NPC with so much HP that the game gave him three bars to display it all. Kana came to the obvious conclusion that, to put it simply, they were fucked.

The longer he fought, the more inevitable it seemed. He was at 50% and the shock trooper still had two full bars of HP. The NPC got him to into the red and was barely halfway through his second bar. Then Nibelus summoned ball lightning and it bypassed the impressive damage reduction of his opponent’s armor.

The magic only lasted a few seconds, but in that time, it knocked an entire HP bar off the NPC and brought him down into the yellow on his last one. This triggered the shock trooper to switch to a defensive position, but that actually worked out in Kana’s favor. The amount of damage he dealt dropped even lower, but the tradeoff was that the NPC’s attacks were finally slow enough that Kana could dodge practically all of them.

It took some time, but thanks to luck and his 5-star ranked weapon, Kana managed to solo the black manor shock trooper. With that out of the way, he finally got his first good luck inside the cellar. It looked like a chemistry lab on one wall, complete with vials and beakers and magical heat sources, all bubbling and hissing and releasing nauseating fumes into an enclosed space with no ventilation.

Spiral’s plan had hit a snag. He was holding the stairs and only the single shock trooper at the top was physically engaged in combat with him, but there were two more of the black manor poisoners there and they were attempted to shoot him with some sort of small crossbows no doubt containing poison darts.

Spiral had three more status effects on him in addition to the one he’d started with, and thanks to the HUD info about his party, Kana knew the durations had sky-rocketed up to over two hours each. That was a bad situation to be in when there were still three enemy combatants alive, and two of them at full HP.

Worse, Kana couldn’t see Malia. The whole reason they’d attacked the old farm house was that Spiral had been sure she was in the cellar. If she was, she was well hidden. And there weren’t that many places to hide, so that didn’t bode well.

He advanced down a few steps to get a better look, and as soon as he was past the threshold, a black, human-shaped shadow swept past him up into the open air. Out in the daylight, Kana could see the form of a woman in form-fitting black leather with half a dozen knives strapped to her body. He spun to give chase, but she didn’t bother to run.

“Already feeling the effects of my poisons, aren’t you?” she taunted, drawing two of the knives. They glistened with some wet substance in the day light. “Don’t you worry, you won’t die from them. We like to take our victims alive for further questioning.”

The last thing Kana noticed before she attacked was that someone had sent him, Jon Peld, a message off the game. Then he was too busy fighting for his virtual life to pay any attention to that.