The Wooden Horse!

“Let’s get this thing open!” I announced to Zorro as we both pressed our hands against the big throne room doors. A prompt appeared and asked if I wanted to enter the boss room, so there wasn’t any going back after that.

-Can’t wait to show this stupid Crap Lord Troja who’s the real boss! (ง >_<)ง That guy made me ruin my makeup!-

“I’m sure you have it so rough…” I uttered in a quick, sarcastic tone.

-Darling, I will T-bag your knees into dust. Do you know how long it takes me to look this pretty every morning? (✿˶’◡˘)♡ -

I hadn’t seen her face in what felt like months, so even her fresh out of bed style would have been pretty enough for me.

“Hon, accept the prompt so we can get in already!”

Finally she accepted it and Zorro and I pushed hard against the doors, but it wouldn’t budge. He concluded that a little pickpocketing was in order to find a key.

The_Zorro: -Terribly sorry, señor royal guard! But we need to borrow this key-

“MFFMmmmFPHMM!” Mumbled the gagged guard in response as Zorro swiped his belongings. “Mmmm…”

That key fit in perfectly and we pushed the door wide open.

Once inside we were immediately greeted with an oversized room with a big fountain. A giant wooden horse statue was the center piece and commanded a lot of attention.

Bar that horse statue, the rest of the room was similarly themed to everywhere else in the demonic fortress. High-res, sharp spiked with creepy bone gargoyles and the kind of imagery I expected from a biker dude going through a midlife crisis.

-Nothing says edgy teenage boy angst like skulls, spikes and oversized rooms full of both ┐(˘_˘)┌-

“You might be on to something,” I commented. “Wouldn’t be surprised if Troja was a young player.”

“Young or old…” Tensei commented as she took a Birdseye view of the room. “He’s not here.”

He must have escaped when he heard we were coming. Darn! We probably just missed him.

“Well, if he’s not going to be a problem, let’s do what we came here for.”

The access point happened to be high up a flight of stairs in front of a throne. Tensei worked her magic and spawned it in for me.

-Do your thing, my husbando! Get rid of those freaky pixel Glitched villagers already-

I couldn’t have put my hands on that keyboard any sooner as far as she was concerned. But oh boy... A sweet, sweet rush of pleasure kicked in as I was able to move my fingers once more. I never thought typing on a keyboard could be so satisfying, but I had so few chances here to enjoy any movement of my own will power.

I got right to work digging through the files and found quite a few minor issues that would have been easy to clean up, but I had to focus on the elephant in the room first...or the giant horse in this case, I suppose.

The reason the town and surrounding villagers were turned into low-res freak shows was because the game’s virtual resources were being routed to other places, mainly this fortress and the many guards defending it. So basically, there wasn’t enough RAM to go around because everything here was stealing it.

-Can you fix that?-

“Easily. I just need to distribute the virtual resources evenly across the board.”

Fixing that was about all I really needed to do here to make the area stable. I probably could have done some tidying up, but nitpicking small bugs was just a waste of time in the long run and could be done after launch. There was the issue of that big wall someone had made around the city though. That probably needed to get deleted.

I sent out the patch and everything around us got momentarily blurry, but nothing major changed.

Suddenly I got a blue screen. The error message just read ‘Losers.’

“What does that mean…?” I skimmed over the screen closely to notice it dissolve into a bunch of random letters and numbers.

*WOOSH!*

*CRACKLE!*

A wind of sound rushed across the throne room. Loud galloping followed.

“Look out!” Tensei cried.

I peeked over the access point to see the big wooden horse no longer stationary, galloping straight up the steps to me!

Rose rolled me away from the computer and barely dodged the wooden horse's headbutt.

*CRASH!*

The access point was destroyed as the horse struck it! Virtual bits of the computer sparkled out of existence.

In the mess I tumbled painfully off the side of the elevated throne platform and took fall damage. If this hadn’t been a game, every bone in my body would have been broken.

-You okay, Ray?!-

“Well, I’m not dead…” I grumbled as Rose got me back to my feet. “Good reflexes, Rose. Thanks for the callout, Tensei.”

“No problem!” Tensei said as she floated up close.

That horse got back to ground level and let out a violent neigh as it stood on its hind legs and its front hooves pawed menacingly at the air.

“What am I looking at, Tensei?!” I said.

“T-that’s the raid boss of this area!” she confirmed. “It must have activated when you tried implementing the patch!”

Before we had any more time to discuss it, that oversized timber stallion galloped in to attack again.

Rose once more rolled me out of the way. Then she did it again on the horse's rebound charge.

“Careful with my stamina!” I shouted.

-No, REALLY?!-

We had to keep rolling, but with each major movement I was losing steam and didn’t have the chance to recover. She had great timing, but I was the weak link here.

“We’ve got to fight this thing,” I said, out of breath. “But I don’t know if we have the stats for it.”

-There has to be some sort of weakness we can use against it, right? Every RPG has that sorta thing!-

Rose’s suggestion wasn’t half bad. Everything in this game had a weakness of some kind, usually elemental. Considering this was wood…

“Fire might work,” Tensei suggested, “since that horsy is made of burnable stuff.”

“Good call,” I said. “Can you respawn the access point? I have an idea, but can’t do it without it!”

“Yeah!” she nodded. “The cooldown to spawn it should end in… 3… 2… 1… Okay! Good to go!”

-What’s the plan here?-

“I think I can give our attacks fire affinity through the computer…” I said as we rolled out of the way of the charging horse again. “But not with Paisley over here racing back and forth!”

Where was Zorro? We seriously could have used his help right now. He would have made for the perfect distraction! Don’t tell me that horse already got to him first.

“I can try and be bait!” Tensei flew in, but the horse didn’t even pay any mind and focused on us. “Hey! Get back here, you! Or I’ll send you to the glue factory!”

She jumped on its back, but it dwarfed her by orders of magnitude. A single buck from that bronco and she went flying off.

She didn’t buy us nearly enough time to call that worthwhile. We definitely needed just one more person here!

I had to roll again, and my stamina was depleted. Without a few seconds to recharge, the chances of escaping another hit were slim.

The wooden horse saw its chance to go in for one final hit. Energy swirled around its head as it lowered for the biggest headbutt yet. No way I was going to survive that!

Suddenly a spear stabbed forward between the horse and me. The raid boss was running way too fast, and the long pointy weapon jabbed right into its wooden neck!

That spear bought me just enough time to run out of the way toward the access point.

“Zorro!” Tensei cheered as she saw he was responsible for that quick spear work. “Just in time!”

“Great timing!” I said. “Hold him off for a minute!

The Zorro: -Never fear! Zorro is here to save the day!-

The horse turned all his focus to my swashbuckling ally and lost track of me. Tensei flew in ahead and respawned the access point. I quickly logged back in and loaded up the proper menus.

“Zorro! Hit it hard!” I shouted as I granted temporary fire affinity to our attacks.

A clone split off of Zorro and managed to get behind the horse. Both he and his copy pulled out a collection of throwing knives with blazing edges and tossed them at the boss.

Most of the daggers lodged right in. After a few moments of scoring the surface, the wood caught fire.

The wooden horse raid boss kicked its legs and panicked, then dove into the water fountain to splash around until the fire was put out.

Zorro did some decent damage, but only enough to kick things into phase 2.

The air around the wooden horse became like a vortex and pulled in all the textures off the wall, like peeling stickers from a smooth surface. Each pixel pasted over its wooden body and gave it the same purple stone look as the rest of the fortress.

His speed dropped drastically, but he charged into Zorro’s clone for a hard hitting headbash.

“Is he going to be alright?” I asked out loud as I noticed Zorro’s overall HP drop drastically. “He's health critical.”

The Zorro: -Just a minor mistake that won’t happen again.-

That horse traded speed for damage and durability, now that its surface was hard as rock. We had to switch up our tactics.

-What’s good against stone flesh, Teny-Chan!?-

“Stone is weak to…” Tensei put a finger to her chin. “Was it water? No, why would that make sense…? Was it grass? Hmm…” her eyes lit up with glee and she pointed her finger at the raid boss. “Ac… Acid! It’s acid!” She snapped her fingers.

That’s right! Acid was great against stone and metal. I switched our attack affinity over to acidic now.

Zorro’s clone caught a ride on the back of the now ‘stone’ horse raid boss. He lifted his dagger into the air and jabbed it right down…

*TINK!*

…but the little blade broke on the stone surface!

-Crap! That didn’t work!-

“Stone resists slashing weapons!” Tensei shouted.

-Darn it Ray! You should have known that!-

I should have, since I developed this stuff. No doubt I needed to brush up on my game knowledge!

We didn’t have any blunting weapons, which were good against stone. The only thing I could think of was maybe a shield? But that wasn’t much of a weapon.

“Zorro! Use a shield bash on it!”

The bash itself might not cause much damage, but the acidic affinity would at least do something, as well as leave a nice chemical burn to whittle away its health.

Zorro’s clone whipped out his small shield and started performing bash attacks with it. The first few strikes didn’t do much, but finally he managed a good hit that left a chem burn!

The raid boss’s surface sizzled and cracked. Green splashes erupted all around its stone skin texture and forced Zorro’s clone to dive off of it.

In one final attempt to swap its skin, it sucked in the water from the fountain and its entire body became like a translucent liquid.

“This one is easy!” I shouted. “Lightning affinity!

This time Rose took initiative and pulled out my bow. We had one arrow left, so she put in all her focus and shot right on target!

The raid boss was electrified from the charged up arrow and its liquid body became unstable. We all stood back and watched as the raid boss melted into a puddle of very dangerously super charged water.

I waited to see if things were over, not taking my eye off that puddle. Once Tensei started cheering, I knew we'd won the battle.