Segmented Puppets is the Lv. 96 Sword Trial in Where Winds Meet, and it packs two very different puzzle fights into one run. The Ironheart Centipede is a deflect-and-disarm check that hands your team temporary weapons to use on adds and charges. Ci and Cuo is a color-matching problem where five players herd dancer puppets around the arena. Neither boss dies to raw damage alone, and all twelve Talent conditions hinge on doing the mechanics cleanly rather than quickly.
Quick answer: Deflect the Centipede’s red attacks to empty its parry gauge, force Disarm Paralysis inside one minute, then split the four dropped arms — two players delete the Centipede Remains, two block and interrupt Repeated Crushing. Against Ci and Cuo, every marked player runs to a dancer puppet of the opposite color and merges it with its counterpart, keeping at least four pairs alive until the boss dies.
Segmented Puppets trial setup and rewards
Segmented Puppets is a five-player Sword Trial with a Lv. 96 requirement, and like every entry in the rotation it is repeatable as long as you have Energy to spend. Clearing the encounter is free; claiming the reward costs 60 Energy per run. The trial also carries its own exclusive appearance, the Never-Delay Feather, priced at 1,880.
Trial versions of bosses do not behave like their world boss counterparts. The Ironheart Centipede you fight on the mountain above Old Mohist City and the one here share a model and little else, so treat the mechanics below as the only ones that matter. Smart Assist is useful for learning attack timings, but several Talent conditions depend on four or five players holding objects at once and cannot be finished solo.
Ironheart Centipede: parry gauge and Disarm Paralysis
The entire first fight runs off the bar sitting to the right of the boss’s health. Deflecting its red attacks drains that gauge, and emptying it drops the Centipede into Disarm Paralysis, where it sheds its bladed arms onto the arena floor. Everything else in the encounter is downstream of how fast you get there.
Crushing Roll is the red-line AoE it opens with and the most reliable gauge drain in the fight. Hunting is the other big one, where the boss marks a single player and throws ten rapid slashes at them. The whole team should be facing the boss and deflecting through it, because those hits stack up on the gauge faster than anything else.
Once the arms hit the ground, four players pick one up each. Those weapons are consumable tools for the next two mechanics, so do not waste them and do not let one player hoard two.
Centipede Remains and Repeated Crushing
After the disarm, the boss casts Venom Leak. It deals damage across the whole arena, applies a lasting poison debuff that grows with stacks, and summons Centipede Remains at the edges of the room. Those Remains crawl toward the middle, and if they arrive they get absorbed by the boss. Two of your weapon holders walk up to them and press F to destroy them before that happens.
Repeated Crushing follows. The Centipede gains a gold shield and rolls down a rectangular lane, and your other two weapon holders stand directly in that lane and press F to stop it. Interrupting the first attack of every Repeated Crushing is the strict version of this mechanic, so both blockers need to be in position before the charge starts rather than sprinting into it late.
The boss also sprays golden circular poison pools around the floor between these phases. Those are dodge-only. Gold attacks in this game are never deflectable, and eating one during Hunting is the usual reason a Talent fails.
Toxic Infusion and the punish window
Take too long on the parry gauge and the Centipede starts stacking Toxic Infusion, which empowers its Predation and Bite attacks. At full stacks it pulls players in and hits for lethal damage. Every extra Toxic cast is also a direct Talent failure, so a slow disarm quietly locks you out of the hardest condition in the phase.
Ironheart Centipede Talent conditions
| Talent | Condition |
|---|---|
| 1-1 | Destroy Centipede Remains using a dropped centipede arm at least once |
| 1-2 | Interrupt Repeated Crushing at least once |
| 1-3 | Interrupt the first attack of every Repeated Crushing and let no Remains be absorbed |
| 2-1 | Deflect 15 times during the first regular (armed) phase |
| 2-2 | Deflect 10 times during Hunting without taking a hit |
| 2-3 | Trigger Disarm in under 1 minute, with fewer than 3 Toxic casts and fewer than 2 Venom Leaks |
Talent 2-3 is the one that decides your pacing. Because it caps Toxic casts and Venom Leaks, the team has to commit to deflecting red attacks early instead of trading damage, and nobody should be waiting on cooldowns to start draining the gauge.
Ci and Cuo: matching the red and blue dancer puppets
The second fight starts with six small dance puppets scattered around the arena and a set of raised secondary stages along the edges. There is a short window at the beginning where you can destroy up to two of those puppets before the boss grants them immunity, which trims the number of colors you have to juggle later.
Dance, My Friend is the core mechanic. The boss drops a gold circle AoE on targeted players and hands each of them a red or blue mask. That player runs to a dancer puppet of the opposite color, which starts the puppet charging, and then leads it into its opposite-colored counterpart. The two puppets collide and merge into a pair, and pairs are what keep the boss from getting stronger.
Secondary stages and the same-color rule
Sooner or later a marked player will have no opposite-colored puppet left to merge with. When that happens, drag the charging puppet onto an empty secondary stage instead. It parks the puppet there and stops it from reaching the boss, and doing it once unlocks Talent 2-1.
What you never do is let two puppets of the same color connect. Watch the path you are running, because a charging puppet will happily plow into whatever is in front of it, and one careless line kills Talent 2-2 for the entire run. Speed matters too: every guided puppet needs to reach its destination inside 10 seconds, and no one on the team can be hit more than five times.
Hand in Hand charges, Thousandfold Swords, and the interrupt
Merged pairs are not just decoration. During Hand in Hand, a paired puppet aims a straight charge lane at a player. Stand so that lane points at another pair, and the charge knocks both of them down at once — that is Talent 1-1. It is the only reason to willingly stand in front of a charging puppet.
Thousandfold Swords is the rotating gold AoE the boss or its partner throws out in wide lines. There is no deflect answer here; the condition is simply to avoid every hit. Dance between Flowers is separate and does have a deflect window — players inside the red circle deflect to interrupt the cast. Miss it and Ci and Cuo fires off the arena-wide follow-up, where the outer ring of the room is the safe zone and survivors pick up a chain blade debuff.
Ci and Cuo Talent conditions
| Talent | Condition |
|---|---|
| 1-1 | Knock down a paired puppet using another paired puppet’s charge |
| 1-2 | Take no damage from Thousandfold Swords |
| 1-3 | Defeat the boss with at least four puppet pairs still on the field |
| 2-1 | Guide a puppet onto a secondary stage at least once |
| 2-2 | Never let two same-colored puppets connect |
| 2-3 | Guide every puppet within 10 seconds, with no player hit more than 5 times |
Talent 1-3 quietly constrains everything else. Because you need four pairs alive at the moment the boss dies, you cannot spend your pairs recklessly on Hand in Hand knockdowns late in the fight. Get Talent 1-1 out of the way early, then protect what is left.
Party roles for a full-Talent clear
Assign jobs before the pull rather than sorting it out mid-disarm. The Centipede phase only works if the four arms go to four different people with a job already attached to them.
| Role | Ironheart Centipede | Ci and Cuo |
|---|---|---|
| Two players | Pick up arms, destroy Centipede Remains at the arena edges | Handle mask markers on the far side of the arena |
| Two players | Pick up arms, block the Repeated Crushing lane and interrupt | Handle mask markers near the center and the secondary stages |
| Fifth player | Stay on deflects and damage, cover a dropped arm if someone dies | Call colors and watch for same-color collisions |
Tip: bring Mystic Arts that help with grouping and burst clearing. Flute of the Tides style pulls make the Remains easier to reach in time, and anything that closes distance quickly helps you hit the 10-second guiding window on the puppets.
How to confirm Talents unlocked, and why they fail
Talents register on the trial results screen at the end of the run, so you will not see confirmation mid-fight. If one is missing, the cause is almost always mechanical rather than a damage shortfall.
- A Centipede Remain reached the center and was absorbed, which voids Talent 1-3 for that phase.
- Only one player stood in the Repeated Crushing lane, so a later charge went uninterrupted.
- Someone took a hit during Hunting, which breaks the no-damage clause on Talent 2-2 even if the ten deflects landed.
- The disarm took longer than a minute, pushing the boss into extra Toxic and Venom Leak casts.
- Two same-colored dancer puppets touched, which is unrecoverable for the rest of the run.
- The boss died with fewer than four pairs standing, usually because pairs were spent on knockdowns too late.
Segmented Puppets rewards preparation more than gear. Learn the deflect timings on Crushing Roll and Hunting, agree on who takes which arm, and settle your puppet-guiding lanes before the second phase starts — the run gets short and predictable once those three things are locked in.
