End Online: Volume 5 Read Online Free

corridor-like
room that is no more than ten meters wide and forty meters long. The strangest
part of the room is that the walls have decayed twice as much as the rest of
the structure.
    My mind is slow to process the change in atmosphere before the
door behind me silently closes and locks. There isn’t a single zombie in this
room, but suddenly a large amount of purple-black smoke drifts down from the
ceiling before coalescing. Smoke continues to pour into the room without any
sign of slowing down, yet the condensed mass at the other side of the room is
gradually shrinking.
    It isn’t long before the densest concentration of purple-black
smoke begins to become solid. I watch as a slim, meter and a half tall figure
takes shape. The smoke suddenly stops flooding the room, and as the figure absorbs
the last of the gas in the air it opens two red eyes and looks directly at us.
    ‘It’s a boss! But it is so small. How strange,’  I think to myself while studying the enemy.
    “Big bro, that isn’t the, umm, final boss of the dungeon, is
it?”
    “No, I don’t believe it is. This should be some form of
sub-boss. Be careful, I don’t think this enemy will be as slow as all the
‘Noxious Guards’ throughout the dungeon.”
    Matrix nods his head in response. I don’t have an analysis skill
like Lost so I can’t tell what level the boss is, but I am quite adept at
comparing their strength against ours and determining our chance of winning.
    The boss suddenly moves, dashing toward us at a frightening
speed. Matrix moves to engage the boss directly while I move around the side to
flank it. With my high dexterity and all the bonuses from the ‘Grand Elven
Highbow’, nearly every single one of my arrows should hit.
    I fire off three arrows in quick succession and gape in surprise
as two out of the three miss. I recover and attack with another two arrows
before the boss reaches Matrix and find that again, only one arrow hits the
target.
    I notice that the boss moves with a strange rhythm, first moving
fast, then slow, and once again moving fast.  This process continues to
repeat itself at a consistent pace, yet it is still difficult to keep track of.
    The boss creates a long purple-black whip in its hand out of the
same condensed gas its body is formed from. It swings the weapon toward Matrix
who prepares to raise his sword and parry the tendril like whip. The boss’s
strange movements catch Matrix completely off guard as the whip arches toward
him slowly at first, before the speed of the attack dramatically increases. As
a result, Matrix completely misses the chance to parry the attack and is hit
across the shoulder.
    A small sonic boom erupts from where the tip of the whip cracked
across Matrix’s chest and even at a distance I feel the shockwave that follows.
Matrix, unable to parry and at ground zero, is blown back and into the wall ten
meters behind him.
    ‘Not good! ’ My instincts
start screaming toward me about how low our chances of victory are.  ‘We
barely have a 20% chance of victory at best!’
    “Matrix! Are you okay?!” I call out to my little brother, who
remains sitting against the wall where he fell.
    “Yeah, big bro! I’m fine! Just, umm, a little surprised!”
    “He moves with a strange rhythm which interchanges between fast
and slow, be careful!”
    “Okay!”
    The boss turns toward me and approaches thanks to my shouts
attracting its attention, but Matrix quickly stands up and activates a sacred
art to draw its aggro again.
    Trying to match my attack with the boss’s movements, I launch
another three arrows at it. Two out of three arrows hit this time which is
certainly better than before, but still somewhat lacking.
    Rather than trying to parry the whip attacks, Mason focuses
completely on dodging out of the the whip’s trajectory, chanting his magic at
the same time.
    “Flame waves in the wind as the wind nourishes the fire. The
cycle of Yin and Yang becomes complete at the tip of the