Dusk (BL Light Novel)

Title: From Now On, 1 Plus 1 Equals 11
Author: [Jeopa] BaskinRobbinsPartyMember

This comes from the words of Honeybread, pioneer of the mathematical sciences.
If you don’t understand, then memorize it. That is the only way for us, the primitive masses, to take one step closer to the truth of this world.
(78 comments)

【Best Comment】Who would've thought 1 + 1 actually was 11
fr lol
fr lol

fr lol
fr lol
stop it tf is this playground talk in a grown-up game

fr lol
sldkfjaoiearw9a0seflk;sdf;kl SDFSFJKSDFJKLSDJKLSF
what the hell did you all eat to come dump this nonsense in general board

okay but like it’s real
deadass real
【Best Comment】Reason why 1 + 1 = 11 [N O V E L I G H T] → in the hidden dungeon, the final boss has a gimmick that resets your level to 1, but if the tank uses provoke and takes the hit for the party, they don’t become level 1 or 2—they become 11

????????????????????
you’ll get it when you see it
so it full resets your level????

nah, it comes back later
oh thank god;;
if it fully wiped it I would’ve stormed the dev HQ and shat in the president’s office lmao
does a game company even have a president’s office

do devs not shit? why wouldn’t they have bathrooms
bro clean your eyes and read
【Best Comment】This boss… is a legend in game design…

lmaooo the gimmick’s so dumb isn’t it, resets your level, and if the tank takes aggro for the party it becomes 11 instead of 2 lmaooo
how do DPS even deal with this?? they don’t have provoke
DPS get evasive skills between levels 1–3 so you just dodge the AoE, it’s avoidable

oh damn
for real this gimmick was the most bonkers to me… all your stats except HP get turned to 0 or 1 lol and then you have to unequip and re-equip one piece of armor to fix it, like what the f—
“unequip” lmfaooooooo

UNEQUIP AHAHAHAHAHA
what attempt is Retaking’s party on now?
wiped on 12th try, prepping for 13th

damn
they have the fewest tries but are the furthest ahead lol
well, it is Retaking… lol

the gimmick sequence is random and the mechanics are insane, so it’s hard to figure out, but once you get it it’s easier than low-level dungeons
agreed. just manage the day/night phase debuffs and solve the current gimmick, and they should clear it
boss got promoted so I can’t watch stream, can someone explain the gimmick they’re stuck on?

it’s the one where the boss sneakily puts a bomb in your inventory lol. if the timer runs out, it detonates and sets your max HP to 1 so you can’t survive the next AoE. that gimmick wiped us on our 4th try.
“sneakily puts” lmfaoooo you can’t throw the bomb away??
nope lmao

...
―
find unused program

block_moth reboot fail. (0xc??null?)
―
It was already our 13th try. The non-stop grinding was starting to wear on me.

After nearly 50 minutes of attempts, we had the early phase practically down to muscle memory. But the problem was that if we wiped, we had to grind all the way back through the same repetitive setup just to retry the mid-to-late mechanics. Like now.
I rolled my neck to ease the tension and straightened my posture. Soon the boss would drop below 50% HP, and that was when the phase changed—when the pressure really kicked in. Any mistake here, and we’d never get to see the gimmick we still hadn’t figured out. We’d be sent back to square one.
I squeezed my eyes shut for a moment, then snapped them open. As if on cue, the boss hit 50% and brought both hands together, forming a glowing sphere of light. It was the infamous day-night phase. (Retaking had coined the name on the spot.)

Fingers moving on instinct, I kept an eye on that light.
The boss threw the enlarged light sphere overhead. It floated behind its back, casting a radiant glow—then shattered into sharp shards like broken glass and reassembled into something new: a crescent moon-shaped ornament enclosing a small circle. That was the symbol of the Bia race, and also the in-game emblem of “night.”
The moment I confirmed the symbol, I started typing.

Normally I’d drop a quick explanation in chat for party members who might be confused, but this was Retaking. No need for that kind of courtesy. He was the kind of guy who gave you the courtesy update.
Instead—
[Party] Honeybread: army

[Party] Retaking: night
[Party] Retaking: ./
[Party] Retaking: ?

[Party] Honeybread: nom nom ^^
It was the perfect time for a dumb pun.
Leaving Retaking to roll his eyes in peace, the night phase began.

The boss began creating orbs of light behind it—its basic attacks, basically. “Basic” was just my term, because calling them “light balls” or “orbs” sounded dumb.
Anyway, the final boss’s "basic attacks" were large-area explosions. When they hit, they inflicted a stacking [Scorch] or [Chill] debuff, and at 10 stacks? Instant death.
Which debuff you got depended on whether it was the day or night phase. Since we were in the night phase, each orb hit gave a stack of Chill. For Retaking’s Bia-race character, who had a lore-based weakness to the dark, each orb added two stacks instead of one.

Light gathered at the center of the crescent behind the boss, forming an orb the size of a fist. It pulsed, split like sticky rice cakes, and the two new orbs flew off toward Retaking, one each.
[Combat] Used skill “Backstep” – Evasion activated.
[Combat] Dodged .
I avoided the orb’s damage with an evasive skill at the last second—but the attached Chill debuff was unavoidable. A little blue icon popped up on the side of the screen, showing I now had 1 stack.

The boss stood still, eyes boring into space, but the orbs kept coming.
I kept dodging, but tanks and healers burn through Stamina much faster than DPS, so there were gaps where I had no choice but to eat a hit.
Then the game threw another wrench: randomly placed AoE zones—either sun-shaped (Scorch) or moon-shaped (Chill). They dropped like a toddler scattering blocks, totally random.

You had to step on them. Scorch and Chill cancelled each other out.
So to avoid stacking to 10 and dying instantly, you needed to find the AoE zone with the opposite element and stand in it. Problem was, most of the zones were layered so thickly it was hard to tell how many stacks you'd get—you could end up adding debuffs instead of canceling them.
Dodge orbs, scan the floor, jump into the right circle, heal. Rinse, repeat. Retaking, who got 2 Chill stacks per orb, was already shimmering with frost.

I peeked at his status in the party list—he was at 9 stacks.
[Party] Honeybread: bet you're cold rn
[Party] Retaking: ha

[Party] Retaking: ^^
[Party] Retaking: yeah it's a heat wave irl and this game still won’t patch in realism
[Party] Retaking: just because it’s night doesn’t mean it’s always cold, right?

He was talking a lot more than usual. Must be nervous about dying.
Just then, the boss began casting again, hands sweeping like waves. The orb patterns stopped right on cue.
The cast time was longer than before—way longer. Meanwhile, the boss’s HP dropped from 44% to 34%. That told me exactly what gimmick this was.

There was only one mechanic with this long of a cast and a guaranteed 10% HP drop: the Mirror Pattern. Another one named by Retaking, since it didn’t have an official skill name.
Before I could even say it, the cast finished—and the screen glitched.
Dots of red, yellow, green, blue, and more flickered chaotically, eating up the display. A short little intro to the Mirror Pattern.

Then the screen returned to normal. My character, our swapped quickbars, the UI—it all looked the same.
But something was different.
In the party list, Retaking had vanished. Just a blank space where his name should’ve been.

We were still in a party. But now, I couldn’t tell who else was in it.
Or if I was alone.