The Bathrobe Knight: Volume 3 by Charles Dean

didn’t slowly start to fade before resetting either. It just sat there unmoving, unyielding and unwavering in the face of every bit of violence he could muster. The bosses’ balls of ice weren’t damaging his group, but his zweihander wasn’t melting a single enemy snowflake either. He was about to give up hope when he finally noticed that one of the circles on the ceiling wasn’t black like the others: It was yellow. Quickly looking around, he managed to spot both a blue and a red one as well. As soon as he noticed them, however, they faded.
    “Guys, did you see it?” he asked the others.
    “The circles? Yeah. Pass me a snowball,” Daniel said, catching one as soon as Darwin tossed it. “Let’s give this a try.” Daniel wound up his arm like a baseball pitcher and threw the black snowball at the yellow circle that had reappeared, hitting it dead center just as it moved to a new location. As soon as the ball landed, the black shield around Sunny dropped and his bright, lemon-colored face shone with horror.
    “Help!” he screamed as Darwin’s zweihander lopped off part of his flank. “He--!” he tried to scream again, but it was too late. He had been chopped up and melted by a flurry of attacks.
    “Red next!” Darwin called, pulling out another black snowball and throwing it at a red circle. It missed. Really? I can nail a guy charging at me dead in the eyes with a spoon, but I can’t throw a snowball properly? He cursed himself, knowing the others were probably laughing at him on the inside for his failure.
    “Let me get it. I used to play baseball,” Daniel volunteered. Darwin obliged him. He didn’t want to fail twice in a row and make a complete fool out of himself in front of his friends. “There!” Daniel called out as the black snowball made contact.
    “This . . . This isn’t fair--” Burny tried to protest, but like Sunny, his life ended far too quickly under an onslaught of blades and furry claws.
    Blizzy, seeing what was going on, just frowned. “I should have kept working. I could have finished another before I died,” he grumbled and sighed helplessly as Daniel pitched a ball right into the blue circle on the wall, dropping the last snow pony’s shield. Unlike the other two, Blizzy didn’t make a sound as he collapsed into a pile of slush.
    “I think that’s the first prebuilt fight that actually had specific event triggers and a basic strategy,” Darwin noted as his eyes darted between the three ruined foes.
    He had finally reached Level 60 during the battle, another milestone, and was eager to check out what he’d receive, but he figured distributing loot should probably come first. Most of his milestone level-ups tended to come with decisions that required a lot of thought, and making the whole group wait for his choice didn’t seem right, so he decided to put it off till later. “Alright, let’s divvy the spoils!” he said, going through the chilling scene and rifling through the corpses. It was a common practice in gamer etiquette for a party to let the group leader do all of the looting so that it could be divided fairly and evenly. While no-one was worried about that within the party, the tradition wasn’t about to die.
    “What’d we get?” They all peered at Darwin as he looked at the three items.
    “Well, we have a dagger that seems to be made of that red ice stuff. It’s called ‘Burny’s Ironic Blade.’ It seems to be made out of ice but has a property which causes it to burn enemies kinda like my sword. Who wants it?”
    There were three dagger users in the group, Minx, Mclean and Daniel. Naturally, three hands shot up. After much discussion, Mclean ended up getting the dagger. “What’s next?” Daniel and Minx both looked in anticipation.
    “Well, we have another dagger called Winter’s Ethic. It doesn’t do much damage, like almost none at all, but the damage doubles with every strike. Who wants it?”
    Since Mclean had gotten the first item, she