Cracking the final layer of the viral firewall felt less like a digital triumph and more like prying open a blast furnace with his bare hands. When the last, stubborn line of corrupted code finally yielded with a psychic snap, the world didn't just change, it ignited.
One moment, Noctar was stumbling through scorching sand, the desert sun a brute. The next, the ground solidified beneath him into black, glassy obsidian, and he stood at the rim of a colossal volcanic caldera.
Below, a lake of molten rock churned in sluggish, orange-and-black patterns, belching up gouts of fire and plumes of acrid, sulfurous gas that stung his eyes and throat. The air itself was a solid, shimmering wall of heat that seared his lungs with every ragged breath, heavy with the taste of ash and metal. He was now inside the Oasis of False Dawn.
"Are you kidding me?!" he roared, the curse instantly swallowed by the volcano's deep, guttural rumble, a sound that vibrated up through the soles of his boots and into his marrow. The fine synth-wool of his new, expensive jacket began to crisp and curl at the edges, emitting a thin stream of smoke.
He shrugged it off in a panic, letting it fall to the obsidian where it smoldered. His undershirt was already plastered to his skin with sweat that evaporated almost as fast as it formed.
// Core temperature critical. Ambient heat exceeding design tolerances for your current biological vessel, S.A.R.A. reported, her voice strained with uncharacteristic urgency. // Active cooling protocols are non-existent. Hydration levels falling. The only solution is to eliminate the source of the environmental corruption. The bug is acting as a localized reality heater.
"Find it!" he gasped, squinting against the hellish glare.
Easier said than done. The caldera floor was a nightmare labyrinth of jagged rock spires and rivers of flowing magma. And it was occupied. With groaning, crackling sounds, Lava Golems these living, walking mounds of molten rock and crystalline malice pulled themselves from the magma riverbanks. Their eyes were fissures of white-hot light, and their mere presence radiated waves of debilitating heat. They shambled towards him, each step leaving sizzling footprints.
Noctar raised his Perdition pistols, but the intense heat haze warped the air, making the golems shimmer and dance in his vision. He fired. The kinetic blasts struck, splattering globs of molten rock that cooled into black slag on the ground, but the creatures simply reformed, their progress barely slowed.
They were less traditional monsters and more like walking environmental hazards; killing them wasn't about hitting a core, it was about dispersing enough energy to break their cohesion. It was a mana-inefficient war of attrition he couldn't afford.
He was forced into a desperate, exhausting trudge forward, firing to create openings, dodging gout of magma they hurled, his skin cracking and drying under the relentless assault. His breath came in short, painful pulls. The Zephyr's Breath pistols were useless here. The superheated, thin air they'd compress would be a pathetic, scorching puff. He was down to his Perditions and a rapidly depleting mana pool.
// A suggestion for future dungeon delves, S.A.R.A. interjected, a hint of her usual snark returning despite the crisis as she guided him around a particularly active fissure. // Invest in heat-resistant gear. Otherwise, your recurring theme of 'naked in a dungeon' is going to get very old, very fast. And potentially fatal.
He didn't have the breath to retort. Every ounce of will was focused on putting one foot in front of the other, on conserving mana, on ignoring the blistering heat radiating from the ground through his boots. He was a man slowly being baked alive, his thoughts narrowing to a single, burning directive: Find Ardyn. Stop the bug.
Then, through the rippling, distorted curtain of heat, he saw her.
Ardyn.
She was a dancer of death in the heart of an inferno. Her silver hair, usually a sleek fall, was plastered to her scalp with sweat and soot. Her beautiful, armoured suit was torn and blackened, one brace hanging in tatters, revealing a forearm scored with angry red burns.
Yet, she moved with a breathtaking, terrible grace and power, her sword is a blur of desperate, steely light as she parried claws the size of broadswords and dodged jets of searing dragonfire.
Her opponent was a creature of myth and corrupted code: a colossal Red Dragon. Its scales were the color of clotting blood, and its eyes were pools of molten, intelligent fury. It wasn't just a monster; it was the boss of the Solarium, and the bug had twisted it, supercharged it.
Heat radiated from it in visible waves, and its every movement was accompanied by the sound of cracking stone and the roar of a furnace. It was the epicenter, the source of the caldera's amplified fury.
Even from a distance, Noctar's Appraisal Eyes, glitching with heat haze, caught the details: the dark bruises on her arms from blocking impacts that would shatter steel, the shallow, bleeding gashes on her cheek and neck, the slight tremor in her sword arm after a powerful parry. She was tiring. She was fighting not just to win, but to simply not be incinerated.
A raw, powerful surge of relief, immediately chased by a fresh wave of protective adrenaline, cut through Noctar's heat-dulled senses. He'd found her. She was alive and fighting. He took a stumbling step forward, raising a shaking hand, a command to S.A.R.A. to pinpoint the bug's exact location within the dragon's data-stream already forming on his lips.
The world tilted.
A wave of dizziness, thick and nauseating, slammed into him. His vision swam, the fiery landscape blurring into a nauseating watercolor of orange and black. The volcano's roar faded into a dull, high-pitched whine. His knees buckled, hitting the superheated rock with a sickening thud he barely felt through the numbness spreading through his limbs.
// CRITICAL WARNING! MENTAL AND PHYSIOLOGICAL OVERLOAD DETECTED!
S.A.R.A.'s voice was a distant, crackling alarm, like a radio transmission from a dying star. // The brute-force entry, sustained Root Access skill maintenance, environmental stress heatstroke, severe dehydration, and combat mana depletion have exceeded your cognitive buffer. Your biological system is initiating a shutdown to prevent permanent damage. You are experiencing a cascading system crash.
Warmth trickled over his lip. He touched a finger to it, and it came away slick and red. Blood. A nosebleed. Then another warmth in his ear. He was bleeding from the strain, his body's capillaries protesting the extreme internal pressure. A deep, throbbing ache, far worse than any migraine, had taken root behind his eyes, threatening to split his skull open from the inside. His thoughts became syrup, slow and sticky.
He looked up, his vision tunneling. Ardyn, a distant, silver and gold flicker, executed a desperate spinning dodge under a sweep of the dragon's spiked tail. The movement was a fraction slower, a hair less precise than before. She followed up with a slash that sparked against the dragon's leg, but it lacked its earlier biting cold. Her mana was low. She was running out of time.
Noctar gritted his teeth, the coppery taste of blood filling his mouth. He planted a hand on the burning ground, the skin sizzling, and pushed.
He would not rest. He would not fall here, not while she stood between him and the monster.
Not until she was safe.
Using the last dregs of his strength, a furious denial screamed into the static of his own mind, he forced himself back onto his feet. His body screamed in protest, his muscles burning, head pounding and his skin on fire.
The world swayed violently, but he locked his bloodshot, blurry eyes on the dragon. The bug had to be in there, a malignant subroutine in its core programming, turning the dungeon's boss into a reality-warping furnace.
He was broken, bleeding, and burning. His admin privileges were a flickering candle in the gale of his own collapse. But he was still a Debugger.
And he had a dragon to kill.