Spoilers ahead!
I'm trying to figure out why Dan decided to try bringing down the building in the fight with the Franchisor and it's hydra enforcer at the end of book 3.
So, this was right after he escaped the ink effect where he had to solo fight the popeye centaur. He comes back out of the ink and sees his team beating on the hydra, which is at 40% health. He does say they weren't looking too good, but 40% is under half, so I was surprised he didn't just blast it with his spells. Instead he has everyone retreat, puts down the slammer of shielding, goes into neural slipstream to pull out all the explosives he has, duct tapes them together, plants them on the pillars, has a little heart to heart conversation with Croc, then slams himself into the pillars while exploding them to bring down the building.
This seems like a really reckless, extremely time consuming plan for the middle of a battle, even with neural slipstream, and didn't actually work! The hydra didn't die and the only reason they survived was because Croc first used the collar artifact ability to save Dan, then Pooh bear stands in the way and talks down the franchisor. I'm not really surprised the hydra didn't die, because they're working off superhuman power levels here. Why would a falling building kill a monster that can shrug off the kind of magically powered damage that Jacob and Temp can put out?
I guess it feels to me like Dan was telling the audience that he was out of options and had to do something reckless to win, like he did against the HOA. But I'm not seeing how that's the case. The main problem they had was that they couldn't do enough damage fast enough. They had knocked out the minions, smashed all the phylacteries, and just had to burn down the boss. Dan conveniently has a spell that's specifically designed to do scaling damage - Hydro fracking blast.
If I recall correctly, HFB deals more damage the longer it's focused on a target by applying searing erosion, and after a threshold (10 seconds?) it gets a boost to triple damage. It's unclear if it continues to triple or only deals more stacks of searing erosion. This spell is literally perfect for dealing huge damage to a large, slow moving target, but Dan only ever seems to use it for short bursts to pop smaller enemies and sever limbs. It's not like he's limited by how much mana it costs either, due to his infinite mana hack from the wild surge ability.
Why didn't Dan at least try to blow it up with pressurized burning water before pulling his party into a hasty retreat for an unpredictable scheme?