Chapter 91: Centipede Graveyard Dungeon Final

The plumes of flame erupted from the centipede's body all around it. The sudden surge of heat forced Titus and Tank to back away from the giant creature. Even Cinder's ice was being melted by the enormous amount of heat erupting from the beast. The flames started to fall off of the boss in small fireballs that floated around the room. The deep red color barely lighting the areas they passed by. At first they seemed harmless, but Joshua got the feeling that these flames weren't there to do damage to them. His thoughts were confirmed when the first small flame reached a pile of bones nearby.

The bones didn't melt or heat up like Joshua expected, but instead they seemed to float up into the air as if the flames were pulling them back towards the body of the centipede. These small bones quickly added up with the amount that were being pulled off of the ground. They formed a rather loose armor around the centipede that didn't block out everything, but would make it much harder to get close to the beast without having to break through the bones. Its exoskeleton was already annoying to break through, but these bones only made things worse. The fact that they were literally on fire also meant that the close ranged fighters couldn't be near them for too long at a time or else they might get hurt.

Tank and Titus both had to back off a bit after the transformation of the boss since the bones protected the creature from attacks by their larger frames. Tank could no longer try to bite it without having flames forced down his throat and Titus was going to have to cover himself in vine armor if he wanted to fight up close and personal with the beast. By the times the bones had stopped forming around the large centipede the temperature in the room had drastically increased and the heat that the creature's body was giving off was hard to deal with.

Before the fighting could resume Joshua noticed something else that was going on due to the flames given off by the boss. Some of the plumes of fire that drifted off from the boss had fallen on the pile of bones made out of the much larger lizards' bones. These bones didn't get pulled back towards the centipede, but instead started forming two large skeletal lizards that resembled the sub-boss. The bones that could connect together while the bones that were separated from the rest of the body were held up by the flames. In the deep eye sockets on the skulls of the lizards Joshua could see the crimson fire glowing brightly as the bone lizards started rushing over to their groups.

"Everyone try to help Tank and Titus deal with the centipede as quickly as possible. I'll hold these two lizards off for a moment." Joshua shouted before charging into the paths of the giant lizards. This time around the lizards weren't being chained back so Joshua had to anticipate their increased speed. When the first lizard crashed into him he used his aura and rock steady ability to hold his ground as it tried to smash him into the ground with its massive skeletal hand. Joshua knocked it aside and slammed his scale blade into its skull to knock it off balance and send it careening into its partner.

When Joshua hit its skull he noticed that any of the cracks his blow created were quickly fixed by the flames that surrounded the creature. In the end it was already dead so Joshua could tell that killing the skeletal monstrosity would be impossible. It was impossible to take the two creatures down as long as the flames existed that the centipede was constantly generating. Joshua was getting the feeling that the crimson flames that they had created by killing the sub-boss was what was giving the boss such a power at the moment. It was a big set up that the dungeon created that was impossible to avoid and at the moment they were dealing with the consequences. Luckily the two skeletal creatures weren't too intelligent and were easily affected by Joshua's heroic shout.

Although the rest of the group were able to chisel away at the boss it would take hours to take it down at the rate things were going and these two pets of the boss would only prolong that, so Joshua need to figure out a way to take care of the two bone lizards so he could focus more on the actual boss. He was one of the few members of the group that could do some real damage to the exoskeleton of the boss and stay close to the body long enough to get some damage in without being burnt alive by the flames all over its body.

The first thing Joshua tried out on the bone lizards was destroying their skulls, but they would just reform and be melded back together by the fire. Since they didn't have any cores the only other action Joshua could think to take was to try to disrupt or put out the flames that were keeping the bone lizards going. 'Lilly have Cinder try to freeze one of these things to see if it will put the flames out.' Joshua said in the party chat since it was hard for everyone to hear him over the roaring of the beast and the constant fighting.

Not too soon after Joshua made that request several pillars of ice rose up around the bone lizard that he was holding in place. He quickly jumped out of the way as the lizard was incased in ice, but he could see that the crimson flames were still flickering inside of the now frozen lizard. 'No good. It might hold up for a few minutes but the ice is already cracking. The thing is still active inside of it.' Joshua said before turning his attention to the other lizard that tried to swipe at him with its tail. He leaped over it and backed away while sending an energy slash at it to force it back.

'Let me try something. I might be able to douse the flames.' Brook said getting Joshua's attention. He suddenly saw water starting to form in the area around the lizard that he had just knocked back. The fact that Brook was being forced to conjure most of the water made it more taxing on her, but soon enough there were six large balls of water floating around the lizard. It continued to try to rush towards Joshua, but streams of water started to pour out and shape themselves around the lizard and all of its flames. The water quickly started to put out the flames causing steam to erupt all around the lizard. Even so there was more than enough water created by Brook to eventually force the flames down to nothing more than a flicker.

With the flames nearly put out the movement of the bone lizard dropped down to a snail's pace as if it was being slowly petrified. Brook then forced the steam to condense to generate more water and surrounded the lizard in a large ball of water making the flames on the lizard almost none existent. Cinder then incased that large ball of water with ice and completely restrained the lizard. Just as the two had finished their combination of attacks the other lizard broke out of the ice prison that Cinder had created, but its flames weren't nearly as strong as before. This made it easy for Brook to douse its flames with a few more streams of water. This time around Tank had sent out a surge of water at the large centipede to get it to back off. Brook was able to draw from that water to continue her assault on the lizard.

Soon the second lizard was doused and trapped in a prison of ice allowing Joshua and the rest of the group to focus on the boss. It had taken nearly half an hour to take down the two bone lizards and in that time they had hardly done any real damage to the boss outside of a few injuries that Aito and Katsumi were making sure didn't heal with their constant spray of bullets and arrows. The boss kept trying to go after Tank since the turtle's water had been the biggest threat to it so far during the fight. Although the water didn't directly injure the centipede it would douse its flames allowing the rest of its enemies to go in and get some damage done.

While the centipede kept trying to go after Tank, Titus would use his vines to hamper it. Although the vines would eventually burn away whenever put into contact with the centipede they still slowed it down enough for Tank to avoid its more aggressive attacks that were aimed at anything outside of his shell. Titus also ripped off one of the tail bones of the lizard's to use as a club as he slammed it into any openings in the centipedes bone armor that he could find. His efforts were only giving marginal results, but it was creating openings for Robin's spells to wreak havoc on the centipede's actual body.

Now that they knew of a way to deal with the creature they got to work on the long and tedious task of putting out the flames on the centipedes body for a time then attacking that area enough to cripple the creature. Of course the centipede didn't just sit there and let them do it which only dragged things out much more than any of them would have hoped. The creature did shoot out torrents of flame from time to time to get the close ranged fighters to back off or deal with the ice that Cinder was constantly creating. It also had this annoying shriek that stunned anyone that got to close to it. Joshua was the only one that was immune to the shriek so whenever it happened he made sure to get anyone that was stunned to safety before doing anything else.

In the end the fight took hours to come to a close well into the night. On a couple of occasions they had to take care of the bone lizards all over again because their flames would slowly boil the water that trapped them and melt the ice. Throughout the entire fight Brook was the most valuable contributor since she gave everyone else an opportunity to actually do some damage to the boss. There were several points in the battle where she had run low on mana, but Henry's ability to syphon mana from his enemies and give it to his allies came in handy when it came to long drawn out fights like this one.

By the time the centipede had finally collapsed in on itself its pincers and feelers had been broken off, its bone armor had been broken apart in several places by Titus and Joshua, and it was losing far too much blood from all of its injuries to get back up and fight anymore. It let out one last scream before Joshua finally broke through to its core and tore it from its body. At that point it just thrashed around for a few moments before going still as its flames finally died out.