“Alright, strategy meeting,” John announced after the tenth attempt. “Also, lunch break, it’s been a couple of hours.” Even if the teleporter diminished the walking time, it did still exist and every attempt had taken its own chunk of their day.

From the centre of the Intermediary Barrier, where they always spawned when Fateweaving claimed them, they walked to their house. Aclysia and Beatrice went to the kitchen, one cooking the food and the other preparing the ingredients. The rest of them cleared a space in the middle of the room, at John’s request. The Gamer then grabbed one of the board games they had brought with them and used the pieces within to model the encounter map as best as he could.

“I wish I knew what the fuck you were dealing with over there,” Eliza said, staring at the map. “Can you get on my level already so I can spend some time bashing the shit out of things that stand in your cock-smacking way?”

“Whenever we get to that level, the Raid enemies will be so powerful that even you won’t be able to bash the shit out of them,” John told her, inspecting the map. Just so she and Scarlett could partake in the discussion, he quickly broke things down. “So, this here in the middle is the main boss. He does a massive area attack that must be absorbed and the damage is split. About five people do the trick there. The attack also leaves a zone that deals continuous damage. Then we have a bunch of archers and axemen up on the surrounding walls and two more archers and four additional knights, armed with swords and shields, up on the upper levels. They can all be engaged individually. We don’t know yet if they come down later on.”

Scarlett mustered the map with that information in mind. “Flying?”

“Only to a limited height.”

“Scaling the walls?”

“The walls move to slap people away. Oh, and the stairs only form after the boss fight starts as well. It’s best to just stick to them.”

“How dangerous are those archers?”

“Too dangerous to ignore them during a prolonged engagement. They pick targets at random and are fairly accurate. If all twelve of them are left up, there will be unavoidable casualties.”

There was a moment of silence, while the strategists of the harem contemplated their options.

Lydia spoke up first, “It appears, to me, that we have three available approaches.”

“Three? I was thinking of seven,” Scarlett returned.

“Three general approaches that can be further sub-divided,” the queen elaborated further. “My first option would be to focus on the boss itself. The second would be to send a single group up the walls to make a complete round. The third would be to send two groups. Do any of your four additional options not fall into these categories?”

“One of them. Carry fighters to the middle levels via flying,” Scarlett said. Sitting in a nearby armchair, the naked, androgynous beauty crossed her legs and rested her head on her fist. She would have seemed bored, had it not been for the intensity with which she mustered the battlefield. “Admittedly, I am working with lower information theories here.”

“What were the other three approaches?” John asked.

“They were about where in the central plaza you want to fight the boss,” the technomancer explained. “As accurate as the archers are, they will still be less likely to hit if the distance is larger. If you send one group up, which path does it take? If you use two groups, what paths do they take? That dictates which part of the plaza you should fight in.”

John nodded. “Let’s start with reducing the number of options. I don’t think solely focusing the boss will work. The archers can’t be ignored the entire time. The best configuration we found for people remaining on the ground was Metra, Bae, Undine, Nia and I. People that have high regeneration or other ways to prevent magical damage.”

“We could call Aclysia back into the plaza if we went with a single attack group,” Lydia pointed out. “Gnome would operate splendidly as the single guardian of that force.”

“I don’t know if a single group is the proper way to deal with this,” John hummed. “This isn’t an MMO and the corridors aren’t that wide. If the group gets too big, you just get in each other’s way. I’d rather have two archers dead every five minutes than one every three, if that makes sense.”

“What you rather or not doesn’t matter, only whether it’s effective,” Scarlett stated. “If you have a single group, you pull the boss along the wall they are clearing,” she gestured a rectangle with her foot, “that makes you as safe as can be from the archers still alive and gives you space to place the damage areas.”

“With two groups, we could clear the walls symmetrically, giving us a bigger area to be safe,” John said. “The boss’ normal hits are slow, but still dangerous.”

“If you can balance the damage properly between the two.” Scarlett shrugged. “It’s your face you’re smashing into the grindstone. If ya waste your time, I’ll be annoyed though. You aren’t useful to me if you are weak.” Smiling sweetly, she took the sting out of those words. “You want to be useful to me, right?”

“You might need another spanking session to be reminded of your place,” John stated.

Siena bowed down behind the redhead and wrapped her arms around the technomancer’s neck. “Give me thirty minutes and I’ll have her properly disciplined.”

Scarlett didn’t acknowledge either the comment or the contact, only switched which of her legs was on top in the crossing. When Siena got a little pushier, moving her lips close, the technomancer did lean into the kiss, however.

“Who else is available for the clearing of the walls?” Lydia thought out loud. “Aclysia, Gnome, I, Jane, Salamander, Siena and Sylph, correct?”

“Jack,” John reminded her. “A total of eight additional combatants. Could be split pretty well into groups of four. A group of eight would be too much for the space and the flyers can’t go around distracting the archers reliably because of the outside cannons.”

“Two groups then,” Scarlett conceded the point.

“I should tag along Gnome,” Salamander spoke up. “We can beat the archers down pretty reliably, but it’ll be good to have Smlere ready to fuck up the axemen.”

“Would be good for my mana as well,” John agreed. “I’ll need all I can get, if Particle Skin has to soak the blasts every minute… maybe you should carry Stirwin as well, for extra power?”

“The duration would be lower, but the cooldown is the same…” Gnome hummed. “It’ll cost you extra mana between engagements if he isn’t in item form though.”

John considered the situation. “He could get back to me in incorporeal form,” he proposed. “You use Smlere on the first axeman, split immediately after you are done there, then continue on the archers without him. If you go to the upper levels in the meantime, Combination might be off cooldown by the time you hit the second axeman.”

“That could work,” Salamander agreed.

“Should I go with Siena then? We could go Edge and totally incapacitate our opponent, yes, yes!” Sylph blabbered.

“Would that work?” John wondered. “Doesn’t Edge need to ingest the blood of her target to Unleash?”

“Anything that’s, effectively, the lifeblood of a being works,” Siena told him. “If Edge could bite them, then that should work.”

“I can’t imagine Ohmior Knights are used to pain, so the effect would be incredibly crippling,” John mumbled. The way Edge worked was that she inflicted pain even on beings not made to be able to feel it, so there was some effect, provided she could Unleash, guaranteed. “Plus, again, more mana saved. So, sure, we can try that. Jack should tag along your group then. Between you two and Aclysia, you have the stronger single target damage dealers out of our party.” He looked to Lydia and Rave. “You two go along Gnome and Salamander, then.”

“Sounds good.” His girlfriend nodded along.

“As you wish, my love,” Lydia confirmed as well. “The question remains of which path we take.”

“I’d suggest,” John took three more tokens out of the board game box and placed them on the plaza, “that the two anti-archer groups move up the northern stairs. That way, the first enemy you encounter is an archer each, giving us some immediate relief in the ranged area. It also removes the only two who stand at that angle, which eases things up in a different way.” He gestured along the walls. “Then you just continue on. We’ll have to test if the melee adds on the upper levels can be ignored. If they can’t, well, you’ll have to defeat them in addition to the archers up there. Assuming we can’t or shouldn’t ignore the Ohmior Knights, you’ll also have to defeat the axemen in the southern corners. Then you go back down the stairs and join us for the Tower Knight.”

“The five of us that remain on the plaza will pull the Tower Knight to the upper left corner of the arena. Each time it deals its area damage, we reposition along the wall. We want as little and as unobstructive of the battlefield to be claimed by the fields as possible. There’ll also be a relatively safe area in the upper third of the battlefield, after the first two archers are dead, thanks to the way they are positioned on the walls.” He gestured towards the southern two-thirds of the plaza. “That’s the area we will have when fighting the boss proper, hopefully.”

“All of this needs to be adjusted depending on the extra intel we get on future pulls. Might be that the boss has a second phase that requires us to totally rethink this. We’ll see.”

They headed back out after some additional discussion, lunch, time to let lunch settle, and a shower to rinse of the sweat worked up during the inevitable orgy. About an hour later, they were back in the thick of it.

Their strategy worked nicely from the get-go. As before, the people on the base level soaked up the area attacks. It wasn’t exactly pleasant work, but it was simple. John couldn’t afford to spend any mana on anything but his own defences, so the only times he got to cast a spell was when Rising Annihilation was maxed out. That was once, with a thirty-minute cooldown in between. Otherwise, he clawed at the Tower Knight’s feet.

On the walls, things were more exciting. A single Ohmior Knight wasn’t a great challenge to the groups they had put together, particularly not the bow variant. The true challenge wasn’t the first Ohmior Knight or even the second, melee focused one. It was to fight ten of them in sequence, balancing their own stamina with the need to beat them all before they ran out of room in the central plaza.

Predictably, their first pull was poorly optimized.

While their general approach worked well all around, there were a number of small mistakes. They could be found in the way the clearing groups fought the Ohmior Knight and in the way the Tower Knight group pulled the boss to the wanted spots. Sylph got overzealous one time and almost got herself killed. Luckily, Undine could spawn a clone of herself out of the shadows of other familiars to heal at range.

The real point of sub-optimal play was when they discovered why they couldn’t ignore any Ohmior Knights. After John battered the boss with Arcane Ascension, all of the melee-variants of the additional enemies switched their weapons for staffs and healed the boss. All of the progress they had made was nullified in a matter of seconds, the armour left as gleaming and flawless as it had been at the moment of spawn. Once the boss was fully restored, the enemies switched back to their original armaments.

Little mistakes mounted, until they were simply out of gas. Whether it was their mana that was empty or their endurance came to an end, the group had to admit defeat.

John was fairly certain they could beat the boss, though. All indicators showed that the fight would only get easier as it continued. If there had been an issue, then it had been that they were putting too much pressure on the clearing team.

The twelfth attempt was taken a bit more slowly. Rather than sprint up the stairs and between Ohmior Knights, the clearing groups took their time to recover properly between engagements. At the same time, those in the plaza below only focused on dodging. That would have been boring in a video game, just getting out of the way of a swing every thirty seconds or so, but in real life the smacking of a gargantuan halberd on stone created a respectable adrenaline rush.

That attempt failed because the Tower Knight group wasn’t good enough at dodging arrows yet. It was mostly John’s fault. He had gotten hit one too many times and died upon soaking another AoE, which ended the Raid for everyone.

The thirteenth try ended similarly, causing them to make a minor adjustment to their line-up. Jack was only a minor damage asset anyway, so the Mandala Sphere would instead patrol the airspace. John would use that eye in the sky to keep tabs on the archers and draw some of their fire away from the people on the ground. It did leave the Aclysia group one member short, but they had the damage to deal with that.

The fourteenth attempt ended because Aclysia was distracted. Because the Gamer was no longer right next to her in combat, the weaponized maid got a bit pouty. She apologized profusely after they recognized the reason for her worse performance. After a cuddle and kissing session, she was appropriately charged for the next attempt.

Try number fifteen was incredibly successful, with the clearing groups killing more than half of the Ohmior Knights, but ended much like attempts twelve and thirteen due to John getting hit when he couldn’t afford to.

Try sixteen, John decided he would just concentrate solely on dodging arrows, stay out of range of the Tower Knight at all times, and use Magus’ Step to teleport into the area attack when necessary. He felt like he wasn’t pulling his weight, given that little participation. It was better to feel that way than to be the reason they failed every time, regardless.

They failed that time for no clearly discernible reason. There were just some more kinks that needed to be ironed out.

Try seventeen, they succeeded.

It wasn’t a particularly glorious or interesting victory. Their strategy simply paid off. Everyone fulfilled their assigned role well enough that they defeated the Ohmior Knights one after the other. Nobody died out of carelessness. The two clearing groups reinforced their attacks against the boss. There was no second phase, so they just had to continue what they had already been doing with more people. All of them taking the area attack together made the damage so negligible even Sylph could survive it.

The first boss had fallen after 17 tries made over the course of just 1 day.