"Elsa—!"
In his panic, Sali nearly used her real name.
Though now that he thought about it — why had she chosen an alias in the first place? The mistake had simply persisted long enough that everyone kept using it without questioning it anymore.
Wolnir's miasma spread across the ground in slow, deliberate tendrils. Even if rescue were possible, there was no path to her through it. They had to get clear immediately.
Ordinary magical barriers couldn't stop the miasma. Nobody even knew what elemental property it belonged to. Building a barrier capable of resisting it would require extensive experimentation and a reasonable portion of luck — neither of which was available right now.
The mercenaries had no time to think about that.
"Elsa…"
Sali swept his eyes across what remained.
Ten people, still on their feet and fighting. While he was thinking, another one went down. Elsa's condition — unknown.
He made a fast decision.
"Stop attacking. Everything goes toward staying alive."
Right. Since winning wasn't an option, survival was the mission. The longer they lasted, the more of Wolnir's abilities they could observe — experience that would matter the next time someone stood in this room.
"And stay well away from him at all times."
The concern about the Abyss disabling Teleport Crystals and causing true death still hung over all of them. Being crushed by a giant skeleton was, counterintuitively, the preferable outcome — even reduced to paste, revival was possible. It would just cost a few extra coins.
In practice, they were overthinking it. Wade had no intention of unleashing genuine Abyss corruption on the world. But they had no way of knowing that.
Fortunately, the boss arena was enormous. There was room to run.
The moment they stopped trying to fight, the mercenaries' survival instincts took over completely.
They scattered like startled rabbits, sprinting in every direction across the battlefield.
After all, a warrior's essential field skills extended well beyond combat. Knowing when and how to run was just as important — and on this particular battlefield, considerably more relevant.
One had to wonder, during their frantic flight, whether any of them flashed back to those earlier days spent chasing mysterious hooded invaders around the dungeon.
For a while, Sali's strategy actually worked.
He had noticed something: Wolnir's lower body remained fixed within the Abyss, as though it couldn't fully emerge. He didn't understand why, but understanding wasn't required. With only his upper body exposed, Wolnir's range was limited. As long as they kept enough distance, the miasma was the only thing that needed managing.
A sound plan. Not bad at all, honestly.
This way they could keep Wolnir occupied indefinitely and gather as much intelligence as possible. The squad's footspeed was no joke —
BOOM.
A gigantic skeletal hand drove into the ground.
It looked like a simple attack. Sali felt the danger before he understood it.
The next moment, black flames rose from Wolnir's body like living serpents — writhing, twisting upward, their darkness somehow amplifying his presence rather than obscuring it. Distorted Humanity flickered within the fire's core alongside anguished wails that pressed against the mind. A tyrant's pyromancy in every sense of the word.
Black Serpent.
Several enormous coils of black flame unfurled across the ground and shot forward with frightening speed toward the slowest runners.
The moment a single spark found its target —
"AAAAAHHHH!"
Using the mercenaries as fuel, pillars of black fire erupted into the air.
In the space of a breath, the number of survivors dropped to three.
"I—"
Sali came very close to breaking years of carefully maintained composure.
Of course. Why would a High Lord know only how to spew miasma and slap people? Obviously he had worse. Obviously.
Two companions gone in an instant.
Cold sweat broke across his forehead.
One more use of that attack and it was over.
"Run! Keep running!"
He didn't even need to say it.
The last two mercenaries were already giving everything they had to their legs.
Then the Abyss surged.
It swelled outward like a wave cresting before it breaks, expanding its territory in every direction — and Wolnir advanced with it, crossing the distance in an instant.
He can move?!
Before Sali could fully process the shock, Wolnir swept one hand through the air.
Black mist erupted from the motion.
Skeleton warriors poured from the mist and charged, moving with unsettling agility.
Large bosses spawning smaller enemies — in a dungeon that seemed to delight in subverting every known convention, it had chosen this moment to follow the standard formula.
At least they were only skeleton warriors. If it had been Carthus warriors instead, the fight would already be —
That thought had barely formed before a squad of Carthus warriors stepped out of the mist.
"…"
He made a decision.
He was going to stop thinking entirely.
Because he already knew what thinking was telling him. To have any real chance against Wolnir, they would need a full raid group — maximum players, all of them elites, carefully composed for class balance and magical synergy, coordinated to —
Why am I thinking again?!
He cut through the skeleton warriors and broke free of them. He looked up.
The terrifying skeletal conqueror was riding the edge of the Abyss directly toward him, summoning fresh skeletons and miasma with casual, almost contemptuous gestures. The pressure never let up for even a moment.
The final two survivors vanished into the skeleton horde.
Sali looked around.
He was alone.
For a moment he just stood there, unresponsive, as skeleton warriors reached him and began their work. He couldn't bring himself to react.
Me. I'm supposed to defeat Wolnir. Alone.
Black Serpent came again.
There was no angle to dodge it from.
Well.
I did everything I could. There's enough to report.
At least I'll have something worth telling the captain.
He accepted it with something approaching calm —
BOOM.
A thunderous impact rocked the entire space.
Soft light appeared before him.
Sali opened his eyes, confused.
What stood there was both familiar and completely unrecognizable.
A colossal greatsword. Calling it a door panel would not have been inaccurate. It was unmistakably Elsa's weapon — and yet in its current state it was barely the same object. Crimson patterns ran the full length of the blade. The color was blood-red, but the light it cast felt strangely gentle, almost warm.
Under that radiance, the wounds covering Sali's body began closing on their own.
The Black Serpent was gone.
Smashed apart by that single strike.
"Elsa?"
With no one else present, he used her real name without thinking twice.
"Mm."
Her clothes were mostly torn. Her long black hair hung loose and disheveled. With the giant sword resting on one shoulder and an expression that belonged on a berserker, she looked nothing like herself — and completely herself at the same time.
She gripped the sword in both hands and swept it sideways.
A burst of crimson light exploded outward.
Every skeleton warrior in range ceased to exist.
The force behind it matched a King-rank wide-area spell, at minimum.
The effects of Carthus Beacon and Pontiff's Right Eye had taken full hold — a combination that no one would have predicted would benefit a greatsword user. Even the sturdier Carthus warriors couldn't survive a single exchange against her. Her performance had stepped onto an entirely different level. She might genuinely be trading blows with Sword Saint Gapar now.
While she had been engulfed by the death miasma and dragged toward the Abyss, she had heard the mercenaries screaming. She had heard their fear about the Abyss disabling Teleport Crystals — the possibility of true death, no revival.
The desire to protect them had burned hotter in that moment than anything she had ever felt.
She had never experienced it that intensely before.
When she came back to herself, her greatsword had already changed.
"What's happening to her?"
Watching her descend onto the battlefield like a divine judgment, Sali's eyes locked onto the sword.
"Could this be… the Hero's Divine Weapon?"
Every Hero possessed one. But it had to be awakened — it couldn't simply be wielded. Elsa had never awakened hers, as far as anyone knew.
Had it finally happened here? Facing an enemy powerful enough to push her past a threshold she had never reached before?
The performance certainly matched what people imagined a Divine Weapon should look like.
"No…"
He shook his head, thinking it through.
A true Divine Weapon was something singular — something beyond all ordinary equipment in kind, not just degree. What the greatsword had shown so far — healing, shockwaves, enhanced output — felt closer to an extraordinarily powerful magical weapon than to something genuinely transcendent.
Was it possible for a Divine Weapon to awaken only partway?
Whatever it was, this was exactly the kind of desperate-situation power surge that turned the tide in the stories. The explosive reversal. The protagonist finding something extra when there was nothing left.
Watching Elsa tear through the black flames — spinning through the air like a crimson meteor, greatsword raised — Sali found his fist clenching.
"Go!"
The moment his voice rang out, Wolnir appeared equally inspired.
Wait. That wasn't for you.
Please don't move.
Wolnir raised his right hand.
The darkness stirred.
Something shifting beneath the ground.
Then pure, sacred light burst upward from the earth itself — pushing the Abyssal darkness back in an instant. Anyone the light touched felt as though a god's blessing had passed through them.
Within that white radiance, a massive sword materialized.
Wolnir's hand closed around it.
The Holy Sword.
A sacred relic, stolen from the clergymen he had slaughtered, now corrupted by the Abyss. After falling into the Abyss, Wolnir had become consumed by fear of true darkness — he had prayed to the gods for the first time in his life. And this was what remained of that prayer.
The contradiction of it was stark and almost incomprehensible.
A demon-king of unimaginable cruelty, holding a weapon of immaculate holiness.
Yet when Wolnir straightened his upper body and raised the sword overhead, his towering silhouette radiated something that couldn't be called anything other than majesty. Black and white coiled around him in equal measure. The sight was impossible to look away from — awe-inspiring in a way that had nothing to do with beauty and everything to do with scale.
If his previous crawling posture had been horrifying, then standing with the Holy Sword raised, he was something else entirely. This was the conqueror. This was what had reduced countless kingdoms to dust.
His kingly aura swept across the entire battlefield.
It was almost impossible to imagine what facing him at the height of his power would have meant.
Across from him, the crimson meteor of the Hero descended.
Wolnir raised the Holy Sword, wrapped in endless divine light.
Then he swung upward.
This was, Sali decided in that fraction of a second, probably the third most spectacular thing he had ever witnessed in his life.
Crimson lightning met holy white radiance.
The collision folded in Abyssal darkness and death miasma. Every Carthus warrior nearby was reduced to powder. Skeleton warriors farther back were blasted apart by the shockwave alone.
And then —
"Oh no—!"
The shockwave was coming directly at him.
No. I haven't seen how this ends. I refuse to leave before—
The thought didn't finish.
The shockwave took him off his feet.
Shattered skeleton bones pierced him from a dozen directions before he even hit the ground. He dissolved into light before he landed and returned to the bonfire.
In the final instant before the light took him —
He saw Wolnir's body briefly stiffen.
But the Holy Sword resumed its assault without pause, striking again and again in relentless succession. The crimson meteor was driven downward. The red lightning blazed one last time —
And went out.
Even that wasn't enough…?
The desperate power-up was supposed to guarantee a comeback. That was how it worked.
Perhaps that was the difference between a shonen manga and a martial arts epic. The protagonist's surge didn't automatically rewrite the outcome. Sometimes the wall was just that high.
The dark space gradually returned to silence.
The ancient conqueror lowered his Holy Sword and receded into the darkness once more.
A short while later, at the bonfire.
"Come on, stop sulking. It was one loss."
"Exactly. Next time, we'll have the captain come help you get revenge."
The surviving mercenaries clustered around Elsa with forced smiles and an endless supply of would-be comforting words, each one trying harder than the last.
At the center of the group sat the Hero.
She had her knees pulled to her chest and said nothing.
Beside her lay her greatsword.
Snapped cleanly in two.
Its brilliance was gone — the crimson light extinguished, the patterns dark, the weapon cold and still.
Small pearl-like tears traced slow lines down the corners of her eyes.
Since the tragedy of her childhood, Elsa had not cried once.
But now —
Something that had held for a very long time had finally broken.