“Didn’t I say to stack more dots? Why are there only six dots on the boss right now?!”

Jake rolled his eyes as he added a damage-over-time spell to the boss, acquiescing to the raid leader’s stupid demands. His mana was more effectively used on just about anything else, but if it would make the guy stop yelling, he would waste it on something he was not specialized in. This was annoying, but he couldn’t help but be excited as he faced the challenging boss with a group of people.

Jake healed the small Dwarven Siegebreaker as he tanked the giant Infernal Demon around the room, the dichotomy between the two beings amusing him. While damage over time effects could be a viable strategy for a target that constantly went in and out of range for damage dealers, this was nothing more than a tank and spank.

There was just something about Massively Multiplayer Online Games, or MMOs that always attracted Jake. Something about working as a team, each character progressing in their own special ways, really motivated him to spend most of his available free time playing them ever since he was a teenager.

Despite enjoying playing his favorite game with his many friends, he was feeling like something was missing. The sense of accomplishment was diminishing, and the enjoyment of supporting others was limited by both their enthusiasm to play the game and to improve as much as Jake.

Jake’s primary character was the Summoner class in the game [The Labyrinth]. Often considered the jack of all trades, master of none class, in Jake’s opinion, it was the ultimate support. Using the advantages of various summons, it could win any game of paper-rock-scissors. This was thanks to the amount of effort Jake put into each one of his summoned creatures, just so that they would be effective and available in case they were needed.

His summons could buff, heal, tank, and they could even bring any damage type to a fight. This was on top of all the things that Jake himself could do: the only things he couldn’t do on his own without his summons was tank a boss or bring sufficient melee damage to the fight.

Thanks to this growth, Jake was no longer just a jack of all trades, master of none; he was the master of supporting his allies to bring out the best in them, being just what his party needed, which he loved.

However, it looked like the game of [The Labyrinth] was out of easy-to-complete content, and many of his friends had lost the motivation to gear up, skill up, and complete some of the last raids of the game. It was because of that that Jake had bothered to team up with this group of man-children.

The Summoner class had various specialization choices. Jake had chosen [Buffing] for his spells and for his creature focus: he chose [No-focus]. This gave a minor benefit to any summoned creature that was less than picking other specialties like dragons, elementals, or beasts.

Instead, he would not receive any penalties for bringing different creatures or using different summon types, allowing him much more versatility than any of those. He went through all the effort to collect and earn many rare summons, to have the best of those available to him, to have an answer to almost any situation.

That situation was about to happen. His small raid party of ten players was facing off against the giant Infernal Demon for the fourth time tonight. It was probably the second to last attempt before his raid party called it quits for the night.

At ten percent health, the demon was supposed to unleash a wave of hellfire that would wash over the party, but they could not reach that point on previous attempts. A few classes had ways of mitigating this ability, but their specializations were often less desirable, and they had been hard-pressed to form this group. Other classes could avoid it for themselves only, but that would require them both to pay attention and save such ability for that precise moment.

Jake had a solution, and this was the only reason they were here, facing this boss. He shared over the voice chat, “Get ready. Placing Wartortoise in the center like planned in ten seconds.” As his internal timer counted down, he noticed that nobody in his group had bothered to head there, too focused on trying to maximize their damage to beat their teammates on a damage chart.

He knew this train wreck was about to happen, so he started his plan: finish the boss himself. He knew that even the one-off abilities that would allow the party members to save themselves would not be triggered at the right time by his party members, or at least successfully by enough of them to win. Jake grinned as he realized that the raid leader’s incessant focus on dots might actually be what makes this possible for him.

Jake finished summoning the [Asmodian Wartortoise] with only a few moments to spare. With his spare time, he started acting on his plan. He drank mana potions, placed his mana font, and began summoning the other creatures he would need to make the impossible happen.

The Infernal Demon released its wave of hellfire, encompassing the entire battlefield. Jake did his best to heal through a large amount of damage over time by those hit by the wave of hellfire. However, it only delayed the inevitable and gave his allies just a few more seconds of damage against the boss, damage that he needed. His ‘friends’ raged in the voice chat the entire time, blaming others for their own failure. The boss was now down to seven percent health and enraged.

Jake was completely safe from the damage hiding behind the Wartortoise, as the activated ability created a barrier that protected those behind the giant turtle in relation to the boss, forming a powerful shell of water around itself. The turtle still took the damage, and Jake’s plan was to use this, as he had activated a second ability: [Wartortoise’s Rage].

The more damage the turtle took in the time the first ability was active, the more damage it could accomplish with the second. It just took an unreasonable amount of damage, so this turtle was particularly pissed.

As the angry turtle took on the boss, Jake cast his longer cast-time summons. Normally, the boss would still have Jake on its threat table, causing them to come after Jake before the turtle because of all Jake’s healing throughout the raid: more than anyone else in his party. However, once again, Jake had a plan for this: he had summoned a [Sharkgoblin Assassin].

It would normally be a useless summon in this situation, but he had found that when the goblin had access to water, exactly like the water given off by the turtle, it could create a domain in which it could spread and share its stealth ability with Jake and his allies. This took him off of the Infernal Demon’s threat table. Jake loved interactions like these and found that there were few players that even knew about it because of just how many creatures there were in the game: tens of thousands.

A Beast or Humanoid Summoner could not take advantage of this combination because the penalties involved would simply not allow access to both abilities; summons outside their respective specialization couldn’t have access to everything. This was not the case for Jake’s no-focus specialization. Sure, the beast summoner’s Wartortoise would be even stronger and better than his, but then the Sharkgoblin could not interact with it in this way.

The turtle was nearly dead, and Jake released his next summon: [Swarm of Vicious Blight-filled Mayflies], and once again downed more potions and started on his next. Jake could not use this summon during a raid under normal circumstances. Swarms for the Summoner class could be exceedingly powerful, but they came with one major downside: they did not follow the will of the summoner. This meant that they were now attacking both his turtle and the boss. Jake was only safe because of being inside the domain the goblin created.

The mayflies had several effects. They filled their bites and claws with blighted diseases and poisons that stacked, reducing both the health and effectiveness of the boss. The best part, though, was that these actually extended his dead team member’s damage over time effects, allowing them to help Jake from the grave. This would be a terrible idea to use with his party still alive, as these effects would probably hurt them a lot more than the boss, but Jake could do this because they were all dead.

Jake summoned the mayflies for their last effect: when they died, their bodies would explode and release an acid that would add even more damage and sunder the enemy’s armor. Jake’s turtle died, his valor to forever be remembered, and Jake would only have but a few moments before the intelligence of the boss released another area of effect to both find and kill him.

The boss did not much care to target swarming enemies, as they would die on their own to the boss’s hellfire aura. A shame, Jake thought, as he would have to farm for hours to collect so many mayflies again. 

The mayflies were unlike his other summons he would simply need to revive at a temple. Swarming creatures just didn’t have the same type of connection to the summoner, and when they died, they would have to be captured again, one by one. Still, this was the only path that Jake saw for victory.

With that, Jake released his second-to-last summon, another humanoid. This time, it was a [Korstrazi Blademaster]. The Korstrazi come from a world nearly infested with demons; there is nothing they hate more. Because of that, they have become extremely proficient in killing them. Not only that, they use blights and poisons to great effect. The Korstrazi appeared, only to find the object of his hatred right in front of him.

The blade master immediately charged the Infernal Demon and used even more blights and poisons, enhancing the ones already present on the boss. With the boss’s armor sundered, the blade master’s damage was quite impressive. The blade master had various attacks that were boosted by how many diseases and poisons were on the boss, which, thanks to the mayflies, were quite a lot.

With the boss enraged, even with the Korstrazi’s natural advantage against demons, he would be dead within a few swings of the Infernal Demon’s giant axe. However, blade masters specialize in evasion, and they had an ability they could use only one time per ten minutes that allowed them to become near unhittable for thirty seconds. 

This allowed Jake to make his final preparation, as the boss’s hit points dropped to two percent. The blade master would die in mere moments, as his evasion ability would wear off soon.

The entire time Jake fought his one-on-one with the boss, the raiding party raged at him over the voice chat. They wanted him to hurry and wipe so that they could make another attempt on the boss; they did not think that Jake would win and that he was merely showing off. He was even threatened that they would not invite him back for future runs.

Jake knew from experience they were just mad that they thought they could not get the loot from the boss for all their hard work. They wouldn’t usually care less how or why the killing blow against the boss was achieved.

If they could simply walk into the room and get the loot, they would gratefully accept it and move on. Jake just ignored their childishness and replied, “Just wait a minute, guys. I will resurrect you when I am done.” They would get their precious loot, thanks to Jake.

Jake cast his rarely used ephemeral summon: a [Blighted Dragon]. Casting this creature took up nearly all of his mana, which was why he rarely used it. It was the type of summon that would execute only one attack or ability before disappearing, like a certain fantasy game that was final, yet there were somehow like twenty of them.

Blowing nearly all of his mana for a single attack was simply inefficient, and it was usually much better to cast several other longer-duration summons over a period. Jake could only keep his mana so high doing what he was doing because he had laid down the mana font and had kept his mana as full as possible.

The legendary artifact called a mana font was reason enough for Jake to get added to the raid by itself. He spent countless days farming and hunting down what it needed to make this item, all so that it would regenerate mana for those near it, even during combat. 

Mana would hardly regenerate at all in combat, aside from his Summoner class and random buffs or abilities, so using the mana font allowed his mana regeneration to reach unprecedented levels.

If this party had simply followed his plan, it would have been like a reset of the fight, as the other casters and healers could have regenerated most, if not all, of their mana. Even if the boss had nearly double the total hit points, they still would have won. They could only blame themselves for not being where they needed to be.

With that, the blade-master died, and the Dragon released its blighted breath attack as it disappeared into motes of light. Once again, the blight added and fed on the blights already present on the boss, and it took an immense amount of damage and added even more damage-over-time effects. 

The boss was already dead, it just didn’t know it yet. Jake sent in his goblin friend that had been protecting him the whole time, and it released its empowered backstab, killing the Infernal Demon.