Ero Dungeon Online: My Desires!-Chapter 14: New Item (1)

We ended up spending almost the entirety of Lily's remaining time in-game in the hot springs. No matter how long we spent in the water, it remained the perfect temperature and our bodies never got used to it to nullify the effect. We also discovered that it did not make our skin wrinkly, so none of us looked like raisins when we finally got out of the water.

Lily made sure to promise that she'd be back the next day, and then it was time for Thera and I to head over to our guild's hall.

I was surprised that they didn't kick me out of the guild yet for their own good. I was the only Sin-aligned player in it after founding my dungeon and the guild hall was located in a Virtue-controlled zone, so it was potentially dangerous for them to keep me in the guild.

My alignment meant that any Virtue-aligned player could attack me at any time. Not even safe zones would protect me if they were inside of Virtue-controlled territory. That extended to guild halls. All it would take is a single Virtue-aligned player to attack me inside of the guild's territory for all of the guild members to get flagged due to their association with me.

Basically, it was a huge risk for them to keep me around.

I figured that I should go ahead and leave on my own before word gets around, but there was no harm in one last raid run with the group.

Though, I intended on the last raid with them to be the last.

Oh well.

The night's raid was an easy one that was meant to help some newer members of the guild gear up, so it seemed like a perfect final raid for me. My last raid would involve me helping out newer members gear up so that they could replace me. One of them was a tank, so I'd even get to personally tutor somebody during the raid.

Tanks had to stick together. I never minded teaching other tanks the battles since I knew just how stressful it could be tanking something for the first time.

In total, twenty-five players were gathered for the raid. Five groups of five. One group was full of veteran damage dealers who didn't need anything but were there to make sure we met the battles' DPS checks. The next group was the healers. Three veterans, one member who was experienced but still needed gear, and a new member. Then there was the third group which was another damage-dealing group full of new members led by Jonathon, the floor-tanking lancer. The next group was also full of DPS and led by Thera. Finally, there was the group that I led. It was composed of me, the new tank, two support-class characters, and another healer.

As for the tank that I would be working with, his name was Kedrin. Whereas I fought with a sword and a shield, he fought with a large sword requiring both hands to wield properly.

"What's your build?" I asked him while the others finished going through their food, potions, and other buffs.

"It's a sort of uh... hybrid build. Sorry, I know it's not meta, but I have faith in it," Kedrin answered.

"Well, explain it to me. I need to know what it's capable of if we're going to be working together."

"Right! Sorry. It focuses on mitigation and absorption. I save my cooldowns for mitigating tank busters and have passive buffs that will heal me while I deal damage to deal with the smaller attacks."

"So, you don't bother trying to reduce damage from normal attacks at all, but you can still defend against the big stuff."

"Yes, sir."

"I'm guessing you have trouble with large groups of enemies?"

"Not as long as healers adjust."

I couldn't help but cover my mouth and laugh at that.

"Healers adjust."

Healers hated that phrase. After all, it basically meant "I'll play how I want even if it means taking more damage, so you better work harder to keep me healed."

Going by the explanation of Kedrin's build, it sounded like "Healers Adjust: The Build."

"Don't let the healers hear that or they'll try to get you kicked out. I'm not even joking. See the girl over there with the glasses?" I asked, pointing at one of the guild's original healers. "She is hardcore about doing mechanics properly. She'll probably demand you change your build or she'll refuse to heal the end-game raids if you're tanking them. If you're not using a meta build, you're a roach to her."

"I'll show her how great my build is."

I placed a single hand on his shoulder and looked him in the eyes. "It won't work. I promise."

"It's worth a try."

"Just don't die. If you die because you're not using a proven build, you're going to get stuck on her shit list for a long time. Anyways, since you won't be able to tank large groups on your own, I'll handle that. You can pick off any elites I mark and keep them busy while we AoE the groups down."

"Got it. Oh, I also deal more damage the lower my health is. Think it'd be possible to talk the healers into—"

"No. Seriously, don't even ask. Your job as a tank is to stay alive. If you don't want your health topped off at all times then the healers are going to let you die every fight until you beg for forgiveness."

He sighed. "Alright, but I promise this build is better than it sounds. I'm just missing a couple of enchantments and then I'm going to prove that this build is one of the best."

I highly doubted that he was going to prove the worth of a new build when there were hundreds of hardcore, dedicated theorycrafters online who analyzed every single possible build that there was to determine what the best were, but there was no point in putting him down more than I already did. So, I smiled, nodded, and left it at that.

The Desolate City of Xinax, or as most of the players liked to call it, "Xanax Town," was a raid located in the ruins of a once-great city surrounded by badlands. Most of the enemies were undead – the physical kind of undead. Zombies, ghouls, skeletons, and so on. Because the trash mobs weren't that impressive on their own, there were a lot of them packed together. The very first trash pull of the raid involved nine zombies and three ghouls all wielding various weapons. The weapons might have looked ruined and ready to fall apart at any moment, but that wasn't how video games worked. They still did plenty of damage and never broke.

Fortunately, unlike Kedrin, I had a meta build that was designed to handle all aspects of tanking. Tanking large groups was easy as long as I had enough healers.

The trash groups following that only grew larger and larger. The only times that the groups weren't any bigger was because some of the weaker monsters would get replaced by stronger ones that Kedrin off-tanked for me. Even if had better gear than what the raid called for, and healers who were focusing on keeping my health topped off, I didn't need any tank busters knocking my health down while a dozen undead attacked me.

After enough of the trash groups, we made it to the first boss.

Vulg the Spoiled. A giant ghoul wielding a wooden club half the size of a tree covered in poisonous spikes.

"I already watched a guide, so I should be good," Kedrin said.

I was going to go over the basics anyways. It was my job to make sure that he understood everything and didn't make any mistakes. "How many raids have you done before?"

"Only a few in this game, but I have tons of experience tanking in other games."

"So, you already understand mechanics like tank swapping and all that?"

"Yeah."

"Good. This fight is full of it. Every special attack is going to apply a stack of poison that drains our health. Five stacks will instantly kill you. Four stacks is survivable, but it puts unneeded stress on the healers since it's going to apply constant damage. So, we're going to swap every three stacks. Other than that, this is a simple tank and spank for us. The DPS are going to deal with pools of poison all around the room and a ton of AoE, but as long as none of them drop a pool on us, we won't have to worry about it. If a pool of poison does suddenly appear under you, feel free to glare at whoever got close to you while they were marked."

"Got it."

"You ready?"

Kedrin nodded, so I checked with the others and began the fight once I had confirmation that everybody was ready.

Aside from the complete disaster that was everybody new other than Kedrin running around like cats stuck in bags because of all the poison AoE, the fight went... well. We still managed to clear it on the first try.

Though, a certain glasses-wearing healer made sure that all the new members got properly scolded for the stress that they put on the healers.

As for me, I spent the entire fight imagining monster sex.

When it came to undead monsters such as those we were fighting in the dungeon, they would make any sex count as necrophilia. Seeing as how necrophilia with zombie monsters was considered too taboo for most countries to allow, the game naturally did not allow that.

I personally thought that it could be nice. Some undead monsters had tentacles, so it would basically just be normal tentacle sex when it came down to it. It would only technically be necrophilia because the monster that the tentacles came from was considered technically dead.

And then I started thinking about what would happen if people came back to life in reality.

What if somebody died and then returned from the dead without a beating heart, no rotting or anything, maybe a little bit pale, and with their personality and intelligence still intact? If a husband died, would it be necrophilia for his wife to have sex with him even if he was still effectively a normal human in every way other than the non-beating heart thing? Would that be illegal?

Just like that, I got an idea for my next "discussion" video. My discussion videos usually brought on a guest who I'd discuss controversial topics with while trying to look at it from every side of the issue. For example, I was once made a video about what if legal lolis were real? Would a girl who is thirty years old but with an immature body not be allowed to partake in any sexual activities? Would she be allowed to marry or not? How would the people who entered a relationship with such a person be seen? Would they be given equal rights similar to regular women their age?

That video generated a lot of controversy for being a simple thought experiment. I expected that to happen, though.

The only thing that me and my discussion partner were able to agree on was that boys who look younger than they are would be treated more fairly than girls who look younger than they are. Because, of course, nothing is as serious when it involves an underage boy.

One of the only videos of mine to reach equal levels of controversy to the legal-but-looking-underage video was the video I made calling out abuse against underage boys and how people don't treat it as seriously. Of course something like that generated controversy.

It takes a lot to sicken me. I mean, I'm not into it, but I wouldn't blink an eye if I accidentally came across scat porn. As long as everybody is a consenting adult and being safe, I don't care about what they do. But people who don't treat the abuse that underage boys go through as seriously as they would treat it if they were girls? Now, those people are far more disgusting to me than any literal shit lover.

I went into such a long ramble about those topics to Kedrin that we arrived at the second boss without even realizing it.