[Mirrinus]

A larger update for today. I just wanted to finish up Floor 14, so I crammed what I had initially planned for two updates into one.

Spoiler

Let's Play Labyrinth of Touhou - Chapter 19

*YAWN* What a long day, Sis!

Yes, it's certainly been quite eventful. Let's head back soon, it's past your bedtime.

Aww...but I still have so much energy left! You never let me stay up!

And for good reason. You're still a growing girl.

Am not!

OK, that sounded awkward. Let's just move on to our day's exploits.

Even after our triumph over the ghostly princess, the 14th Floor was still replete with plenty of adversaries to test our mettle.

Yeah, but we totally made them go POP!

Indeed, Flan. The first of these to discuss is the Mandrake Sigil boss, the Dark Forge. A being of condensed magic, it wielded immense magical spells.

It was like Patchy! Except more evil and less boring, I guess.

Now now, that's not a nice thing to say about someone. Patchy can be plenty evil when she wants to be.

But it was just as squishy as Patchy!

Yes, I was a lot less of a challenge than the other battles we've had as of late. But of course, that was not all that was to be found on this floor.

Oh yeah! We also got to see Alice's dolls again!

I'm not quite sure what Alice's dolls were doing here as another Sigil boss, but I suppose we can extract a confession out of her later. However, it is undeniable that these behaved just as her earlier underlings did.

Their spells were exactly identical as before, but this time the three dolls attacked as one, cycling through their specialties in a predictible pattern. I wonder, did Alice model her dolls off of these foes, or were these somehow the product of her own creation, given new life by the Labyrinth?

Uuuu, that's complex, Sis! You're making my head hurt just thinking about it...

I suppose it's no use pondering these things when we had more immediate threats to worry about. There was, in fact, one more major threat on this floor that we had to overcome, which came with the conclusion to that debacle that Yuyuko had tried to resolve earlier.

Oh yeah, you mean that cat that stole the bodies of those dead knights? That's creepy...

As we had suspected, the culprit was none other than Rin Kaenbyou, or as she prefers to be called, Orin. We found the black cat from the former hell prowling this floor, performing some sort of necromantic ritual.

Sis, what does "neck-row-man-tick" mean?

Let's not talk about it this late, Flan. It'll give you nightmares.

Stop treating me like such a child! I can handle it!

I'll keep treating you like this if you keep throwing tantrums. Now, be a good girl and let me continue with the story.

Uuuu...meanie!

Under the pretense of resolving the whole Strange Space incident on behalf of her mistress Satori Komeiji, Orin claimed to have stolen the corpses of the knights to resurrect them as her own powerful undead army. Of course, we were skeptical of her story, so she decided to throw one such knight against us while she made her escape.

This Knight of the Round Table was stronger than the average foes we were used to facing, but still not enough to pose too much trouble to us. However, it did buy enough time for Orin to escape. If one such knight could give us this small amount of trouble, what could the remaining 10 do?

The cat wasn't very eager to keep playing with us, though. We tried chasing her for a long time, but when we finally got close, she threw another knight at us!

Yes, this floor's design does make it difficult to keep her pinned down. But after our second skirmish with her knight, we did come up with a plan to box her in. Our next meeting would not end the same way.

With nowhere left to run, Orin was forced to contend with us. Unfortunately, it appeared she still had the remaining 9 knights with her.

When she said "attrition", she wasn't kidding.

She just kept throwing more knights at us! How many toys did she have for us to break?

After defeating one more knight, she produced yet another without giving us a moment to catch our breath. It seemed she planned to wear us out completely before she made her next move.

It was so annoying! It's not fun playing the same game over and over again.

Recognizing that we could defeat her individual knights without much difficulty, Orin decided to step up her game by attacking us with two knights at once. This proved to be much more of a challenge.

And even after we managed to beat those two tin cans, more just kept coming! How many were there left at that point, Sis? Let's see, eleven, then to nine, subtract one, subtract another, subtract two...

I got so fed up with them, I just wanted to destroy them so badly! So I finally took out my secret weapon: my Laveatein wand!

You did a good job, Flan. And you can apparently do math better than a certain ice fairy we know. Your big sister is proud of you.

Thanks, but that stupid cat still had three more!

Well, at least we could take comfort in knowing she was out of tricks once we cleared those last three knights.

Yeah...but I was getting pretty tired by then.

As we suspected, the knights were all just a ploy to tire us out. How just like a cat, to toy with us until we were exhausted before going in for the kill.

The knights themselves may have been powerful, but Orin decided to use them to capture an even greater prize: ourselves.

She really scared me with what she said! Sis, is that what "neck-row-man-tick" means?

Don't worry, Flan. I'll be sure to punish that cat for being so mean to you. Exhausted or not, we have no intention of giving up our bodies.

~ The Scarlet Sisters

A few notes on the first two Sigil bosses:

Spoiler

The two Sigil bosses on this floor aren't that hard. If you can beat Yuyuko or Mokou, you shouldn't have much trouble with these guys.

Dark Forge is pretty straightforward. It doesn't have much HP or defense, but it will cast some extremely powerful spells, including the dreaded Ether Flare. Don't be surprised if characters with low MND get killed by it, but it only has 240,000 HP, which isn't much for a boss at this point of the game (Yuyuko had over twice as much, and much better defenses to boot), so it's not too kill it before it can kill you, especially since it's not that fast and is somewhat more vulnerable to debuffs and status effects than most bosses. It's weak to Spirit and slightly resistant to every other element.

Triomagen is basically Alice's three dolls (Healing Light, Magical Light, and Beautiful Light) merged into one. It has a lot more HP than Dark Forge, but still not nearly as much as the Touhou character bosses. It's exceptionally fast, but luckily its attacks are very predictable. It has all the attacks that Alice's dolls had, but will always attack in the pattern of Magical Light > Healing Light > Beautiful Light. So it'll always use a moderate multitarget magic spell, then either Healing Prayer or Weakening Prayer, then a stronger single-target physical attack. Healing Prayer can heal around 70,000 HP in one shot, but it's honestly little more than an annoyance. Weakening Prayer is actually its most severe attack, I think, as cutting every stat in half can completely cripple a character. Luckily, it's only single-target, so you can just switch out and not worry about it anymore. Triomagen is weak to wind, neutral to nature, and fairly resistant to every other element; it's also fairly resistant to paralysis but more prone to stat debuffs. Since it will always use multi-target spell > support spell > single-target attack, you can safely switch in glass cannons into slots 3 and 4 after its multi-target attack, and not worry about being hit for a while. Characters with high MND, like Patchy, can safely sit in 4th position and never get hit by anything but the weak magic spell, since Triomagen doesn't have any multi-target physical attacks.