What's the most dangerous thing about fighting monsters?
...
Is it their abilities, powers, intelligence, adaptability, tactics, or even their tail?
No!
The most dangerous moment is when the monster enters a stage where it seems like it's sacrificing its life just to take you down.
That's what a Berserker stage is called.
The Berserker stage increases a monster's or hunter's physical prowess and stats by tenfold. In this stage, people might call them invincible, a new form compared to their former selves.
For example, A C-rank hunter can become an A-rank hunter using the Berserker stage, surpassing the potential that some might never reach in their whole life.
But-
The Berserker Stage comes with some serious downsides,
mainly that it only lasts for a short time. Side effects can range from heavy bleeding, confusion, and exhaustion to, in severe cases, slow death or permanent crippling.
Because of this, laws were established to regulate its use.
Many hunters and intelligent monsters avoid it unless they're strong enough to handle the risks, like A-rank or higher. While side effects still occur for them, they're not as dangerous compared to those faced by lower ranks who can't endure them for long.
The fact that Queen Pale Stalker used the Berserker stage clearly shows she can handle it without major drawbacks.
Her mana didn't just spread—it erupted.
One moment, the air was breathable, the next, it had a texture, a crimson interference that pressed into the lungs and set something behind the sternum ringing like struck iron.
Nia hit the ground and didn't get up right away. That was the first sign something was wrong—Nia always got back up, given her strength exceeds everyone else here currently.
She pushed herself to one knee, jaw set, and the pressure bore down again, and she stopped there.
"Don't fight the mana," Marcus said, from somewhere in the haze. "Let it pass through. Don't resist it."
"Easy to say," Venia said through a cough that doubled her forward. "It's not like we can tell our bodies not to absorb this mana."
"Breathe shallow. Long exhale."
No one confirmed if it worked, as the Queen had eased the pressure she'd been applying and started moving through.
The first limb slammed down like a piston.
Jones caught it on the shield by reflex, but he couldn't position himself to minimize the impact. The force tore through the metal, up his arm, into his shoulder, and something in the joint made its condition painfully clear.
He stepped back but kept the shield raised with his other hand.
"Jones—"
"I'm holding," he said, panting, droplets of blood coming down from his hand.
His arm didn't agree, but his arm wasn't running this conversation.
The Queen pulled her limb back and slammed it down again,
just like before,
With the same force—she'd found a move that worked and wasn't looking to change it yet.
Jones ducked low, deflecting the blow instead of blocking it, and the limb glanced off the shield's surface, slamming into the ground beside him with enough force to crack the stone.
She was learning.
But not fast enough—the berserker state gave her new strength, yet it couldn't heal her wounds, and they were piling up quickly.
Jones could sense it in the pauses between strikes—they were faster, more fluid. She was recalibrating. 'How can a monster be this intelligent?'
"BASH. BASH. BASH."
With a roar, he slammed the shield into one of her legs to throw off her rhythm. She stumbled a single step to the right — not from pain, but from the surprise of it.
Old creatures were cautious, and surprise always made them lose a beat.
One beat was enough.
"The left side is open," Marcus said.
Ares was already moving through it.
Sylvie lost her position the moment the Queen went crimson.
The blast had slammed her into the wall, the taste of iron in her mouth, and she'd landed hard on her back.
She checked herself quickly, "I'm alive." Ribs felt fine, fingers still gripped the bow.
She stood, staggering a bit.
The range she'd relied on for her eye shots was gone, and the Queen had drifted deeper into the tunnel.
Pale stalkers that had fled earlier were creeping back along the walls, drawn to whatever signal the crimson state gave off.
Sylvie looked at her bow, then closed her eyes, 'My mana isn't enough.' Her mana had practically emptied and wasn't enough to conjure arrows anymore.
Looking at the approaching Pale stalkers and the rest fighting the Queen. She clicked her tongue.
"I guess I'll have to use this."
She switched to the dagger that she had sneaked in and still had.
She hated the dagger—good with it or not, it meant close quarters, chaos, and losing sight of the bigger picture.
Still, she charged in, using speed and agility. The nearest pale stalker fell before it even sensed her, and she moved on to the next, patrolling the edges to keep them off the main group's flanks, darting fast enough that none could pin her down.
It wasn't glamorous, but it kept them alive.
Venia had five mana bullets left — or at least that's what she could sense from the mana still in her. As a B-rank gunsman, running dry mid-fight wasn't exactly shocking.
The Queen's crimson state changed everything about the center spike. In the normal phase, it had been easy to spot — her bullet had passed through it like cloth.
Now, in crimson, it pulsed with a deep arterial red, the rest of the crown a dull scarlet, as if something had lit the one thing that mattered from within.
"The center spike is glowing," she called to Ares.
"I see it," he replied.
She lined up the shot from forty meters, but the Queen shifted toward Jones, cutting off her angle before she could fire.
Her mana trickled away.
Three bullets left.
Henry stood at the edge of the chaos.
A quarter of his mana had been restored, confirmed by three careful calculations since the crimson phase began. Twenty-two percent — just enough for the escape run, with nothing to spare.
The east corridor loomed twelve meters behind him, but he hadn't moved toward it. He knew it was there and figured he could make the same choice in thirty seconds as now, urgency lay in what came after, not in the choice itself.
Nia was down again — not out, just moving slower than usual, though still faster than most at full speed.
The crimson mana was affecting her differently, a fact he tucked away without solving.
She needs an opening.
His eyes fixed on the Queen, then the center spike, glowing like a coal.
'This is my last shot.' He raised his right hand.
"Fire of Death." Not a fireball — he lacked the mana for that — but a tight, pressurized column aimed at the ground before her, angled to send heat and light up along the crown. Not for damage, but illumination.
The spike caught the light and blazed. Four seconds later, his mana was gone again.
Four seconds was all it took.
First, Nia caught the light.
Second, she was on her feet.
Third, she closed the gap to the Queen, seizing two limbs — one in each hand — and yanking them apart.
The Queen couldn't turn, swing, or pull back, but she could still let out a shriek.
And she could still use the center spike.
She dipped her head.
"Jones—"
Jones was already moving, shield angled to block if she hurled it instead of driving it, forcing the strike upward and away from the group.
She hurled it high.
Jones stepped into its path.
CRACK.
The blow dropped him to one knee, his arm numb past the shoulder — but the shield stayed in his grasp.
"Three more seconds," he said, through gritted teeth. "That's what I've got."
Three seconds was all Ares needed.
He moved in from the right — not diving from above or striking from afar, but slipping inside the Queen's guard, past the swing range of her locked limbs, into the gap Nia had held open by freezing the flow of the fight.
The center spike loomed before him.
Up close, it wasn't bone. Not at the base. Where it joined the crown, it was flesh — dense, fibrous, richer in color than the rest of her, threaded with something that pulsed in rhythm with the crimson spreading through her shell.
Vital tissue.
He slid the blade in sideways.
Not a slash, but a deliberate cut — steady pressure forcing through resistance, the way you push past anything that refuses to yield.
It yielded.
The center spike came free.
The sound the Queen made wasn't a frequency.
It wasn't the steady resonance she used to dim the light or summon her colony.
This was different—an involuntary sound from something that had never known pain until now, realizing too late it was possible. High and shapeless, it bounced off every surface in the tunnel, not ending so much as fading away into nothing.
Every pale stalker in the corridor stopped.
Nia released her grip on the limbs,
and the Queen's head dropped.
Ares drove the sword down through the crown, into the gap where the central spike had been, cutting through fibrous tissue and into the structure beneath. He leaned in, both hands on the hilt, pushing until the resistance shifted from force to simply what remained to be pierced—until there was nothing left.
The Queen's legs gave way first, followed by the rest of her, collapsing slowly, as if the decision had been made long ago and the body was just catching up. Crimson drained from her shell, fading to pale, then to the white-grey of her base color, while the bioluminescent moss on the walls, dormant since the phase transition, returned in soft, amber glows.The tunnel returned to itself.
The remaining pale stalkers moved without any signal, no recall frequency, and no orders from above. They slipped back into their tunnels.
"She's dead. Right?" Marcus said.
He'd been moving to confirm it before the final blow landed.
"Please, don't jinx it. I don't have the strength to defend against that again," Jones said, sitting on the floor with his shield resting across his knees, his shield arm clutched to his chest by his other hand. The numbness in his shoulder was starting to morph into a sensation with very strong opinions about the joint.
"Tell me that was worth it," he said.
"We're alive," Venia said, looking at her guns.
"That's the minimum. We're still on the first floor. Others have gone deeper."
The thought settled in, and everyone knew how this was going to go. Five floors, five times to die.
Sylvie leaned against the tunnel wall, eyeing her dagger before noticing the pale stalker residue smeared along most of her left side. A sound slipped from her throat, making her flinch and nearly retch.
Nia, sitting cross-legged beside the Queen's body, casually prodded one of the dormant limbs with her finger.
"I wonder if that was her strongest form," she said.
"Please don't say that out loud," Sylvie said.
Ares pulled his sword free.
He looked at Henry.
Henry stared at his right hand—the one he'd used for the column, the last thing he still had. His face held its usual look: calm, unreadable, as if his thoughts were far away.
Ares looked at the detached spikes and their size.
"Nia!" A second later, she was already beside him. "What do you need?"
"I need you to take parts from each of these spikes."
"Okay," she replied without hesitation, taking small chunks from the two outer spikes and the center one. Nia handed him the pieces, and Ares immediately walked toward Henry as the others watched. He held them out.
Henry glanced at the small chunks, then at Ares.
"We helped each other out, so you should have this too," Ares said.
"I don't need it from you," Henry replied, annoyance etched across his face.
'This bastard.'
"Fine, think of it as evidence."
"That we were here."
Henry stared at him for a moment before taking the spike.
....
....
Observation Room
The room had fallen silent when the Queen's legs gave out, and the quiet still lingered.
"We need to reclassify this floor," Liora said. "An S-rank native on the entry level changes the entire deployment profile."
"After," Brown replied.
"After what?"
He didn't answer right away. His pen had stilled—something Kendrick knew meant he was thinking, not taking notes.
On screen eleven: Ares, standing by the Queen's body, wiping his sword clean on the tunnel floor.
On screen four: Henry, holding the chunk from the spike he'd taken without any clear reason.
Brown's pen started moving again.
"Heckerson's mana reserve was at least a quarter from the analysis before he fired," Kendrick read from the system data. "After—if we calculate in numbers, about four percent."
"Eighteen percent," Brown said, "used on a light source so someone else could see a target." He paused. "That's not how a man behaves if he's planning to leave."
Kael stared silently at the screen.
"He built toward the exit three separate times," Valerius said. "By my count."
"Yes," Brown agreed.
"And then he didn't."
"No." Brown studied the screen a moment longer, then went back to writing. "Something changed his calculation. I want to know what—and when. I don't think it was the light column. That was just the result. The change happened earlier."
No one in the room offered a theory.
On screen eleven, Henry turned the spike over in his hands, examined it once, then set his gaze elsewhere—the way you do when you've already decided what it means.
Brown kept writing, not stopping once.