"We'll see how you handle this, you disgusting beast."
Caelan's voice cut through the heavy air of the chamber while the boss's heat still pulsed from its awakening. The dungeon core hovered beside it, brighter than before,almost as if the dungeon itself was watching with interest, curious what these intruders would do now that they'd come this far without a single flicker of hesitation.
Caelan didn't wait.
What he'd done in the corridors had been a shadow of this. He lifted a hand, and this time he didn't compress the energy into a narrow, precise stream. He let it gather wide,brutal, indiscriminate, with no attempt to limit the blast radius.
The air in front of him caved inward, as if the chamber's breath had been ripped out in one violent pull.
Then it detonated.
Not a fireball.
A blast of pure, compressed thermal force tore the space in front of him open and slammed into the center of the arena with enough power to make the rock groan. The floor cracked outward in spidering lines, throwing up chunks of molten stone and a cloud of burning dust that swallowed the boss's silhouette,and the dungeon core along with it.
Dorian and Lysand reacted instantly. No words, no signal, like they'd drilled it for years.
In the same heartbeat, air began to whirl at the edges of the blast as Dorian loosed a series of concentrated blades of superheated wind, slicing into the cloud at regular intervals. Lysand drove his fist into the ground, ripping up several massive pillars of glowing stone from beneath the floor,pillars that erupted again the moment they struck whatever stood at the center.
The chamber vanished into ash, smoke, and incandescent grit. A shockwave rolled across the arena, forcing the adventurers back a step or two, faces covered, bodies pressed tighter to the columns for whatever minimal shelter they could provide.
The mages didn't budge.
Their auras rippled. Caelan even smiled at the swirling cloud, like the outcome was a foregone conclusion.
"That had to hurt," Dorian said calmly.
"If not worse," Lysand added, straightening.
Rethan didn't share their certainty.
He stared into the dust with a tension that had nothing to do with fear and everything to do with experience.
"Stay sharp!" he shouted over the chamber's low rumble. "Don't get sloppy,this isn't over!"
He snapped his attention to the adventurers.
"You,both of you." He pointed at two men holding strange metallic bows. "Left side. Probe it from range,test how it reacts! Everyone else, fall back behind the columns. Don't expose yourselves unless you have to! And remember,don't all strike at once!"
His voice was hard and precise, stripped of emotion. In moments like this, emotion killed faster than fire. Exhausted and burned, the men moved on instinct, clinging to his orders like the only thing keeping the chaos from spilling over.
The two bowmen stepped forward, runes flaring along their weapons. They loosed short, controlled bursts of energy,thin green arrows,into the cloud. Not to land a killing blow, but to see if anything inside would answer. The rest shifted into cover, ready to retreat further on command.
Then the dust began to fall.
At first slowly,like something heavy moved within it.
Then it dropped faster as a massive silhouette took shape, standing exactly where it had been before: upright, unmoving, untouched.
The boss emerged from the cloud without a single mark.
Its black stone armor was unbroken. The cracks across its body now shone brighter,deeper, steadier red. The heat in its eyes hadn't dimmed for even a moment. If anything, it had sharpened, locked straight onto the mages as if they,and not anyone else,had been recognized as the true threat.
For the first time, something crossed Caelan, Dorian, and Lysand's faces that wasn't confidence.
Rethan felt a cold weight settle in his stomach. But at the same time, he understood something crucial.
"Good," he murmured to himself, watching the beast ignore the adventurers and focus on the mages. "That's exactly how it should be."
Then he raised his voice.
"Attention! The boss is prioritizing the mages,use it!" he yelled. "Hold positions. React only on my command!"
Rethan moved the instant the beast's gaze stayed pinned on the Halvens, its eye-glow flickering irregularly like something inside it was accelerating. Experience told him windows like this never lasted. Miss it, and it vanished without warning.
"With me,now," he said, not looking back.
Three adventurers followed automatically despite exhaustion and pain. Each carried short-range enchanted weapons, and all of them knew the same truth: if they were going to accomplish anything meaningful, it would be now, while the boss's attention was elsewhere and the distance between them and it still existed.
Behind them, the two bowmen held their ground, runes flaring again as they drew and released more energy arrows in the rhythm that had worked a moment ago. Rethan caught it in his peripheral vision,and then his entire world narrowed to the sprint, the uneven, heat-soaked floor, and the boss's towering body growing larger with every step.
Then the beast's eyes flickered.
No roar. No sudden lunge.
Just a minute shift in the intensity of its light,and its gaze slid, barely perceptible, not toward the mages, but deeper into the chamber.
Straight at the two bowmen as they finished priming another volley.
A golden magic circle flared beneath their feet.
And in the same instant, vertical pillars of fire erupted from it.
A sharp, broken scream tore through the air for a fraction of a second before flame swallowed everything. When the fire fell away, there were no people left,only blackened scorch marks and melted weapons that were worthless now.
Rethan saw it out of the corner of his eye. His heart clenched so hard it stole his rhythm for a breath.
His legs didn't slow.
Because if he hesitated now, those two deaths would only be the first of many.
"Don't stop," he growled,more to himself than anyone.
They reached the boss almost together. Rethan struck first, angling his blade toward the deepest fissures in the stone armor. He wasn't hoping to pierce,only to weaken, to add microscopic damage that could accumulate.
Sparks sprayed outward.
The other two followed his lead, one cutting low, the other striking from the side,moving off Rethan's gestures, not his words. In a fight, command wasn't about shouting. It was about making sure people were in the right place in the right fraction of a second.
"Now,half-step back," he snapped. "Again. Into the cracks, not the plating."
The beast reacted slowly, like something unused to anyone getting this close. Each impact left tiny, barely visible scratches,small, but real.
Proof that physical, precise strikes still mattered here.
At the same time, Rethan's mind was racing.
Something didn't fit.
After the scale of the earlier attacks, after the way the boss ignored their strikes and focused on the mages, it would have made sense for the next retaliation to target the mages again.
And yet it had chosen the two in the rear,the least physically capable among them.
Something's wrong… Rethan thought, shoving the idea aside as fast as he could, because a single second of distraction could cost a life.
From the corner of his vision, he saw the mages backing up even farther, widening the gap,clearly unwilling to close in,while charging heavier spells. Denser. Wider. The same kind of magic they'd used through the dungeon,only now they were pouring even more power into it.
And then Rethan understood.
"Stop!" he bellowed at the top of his lungs, not breaking his rhythm,cut, twist, spring back to avoid the reach of that massive hand. "The core's already adapted!"
He turned his head toward them, shouting through a throat that burned worse than the air.
"It learned your magic,the same stuff you used to clear the dungeon! If you want to hurt it, you need something new,something you haven't used in here yet!"
Before Rethan's words could even settle in the chamber's heavy heat, Caelan reacted,almost instinctively. Like someone trained his whole life never to hesitate at the moment of decision.
He gave one sharp nod, and his aura shifted immediately. It tightened, changed structure,less diffuse, more compact, as if he'd reached for a different pathway of the same power.
"Got it," Caelan said.
Mana flooded his hands faster than Rethan could take a full step. And the fire forming there no longer had the shape of an explosion or a wave,it looked like a compressed flame-core, heavy and unstable, unmistakably different from anything Caelan had thrown earlier in this dungeon.
At the same time, the boss moved,suddenly.
Its focus snapped away from the mages and locked onto Rethan and the three adventurers at its feet. It raised both massive arms. The glow in the cracks of its armor dimmed for a fraction of a second,then flared brighter, like it was about to blast them away with raw force.
And Caelan moved to release his spell.
Rethan saw it in one heartbeat.
"Not now!" he screamed. "Caelan, wait,!"
Too late.
The attack tore free, slicing through the air like a molten projectile. It struck the boss's side at the exact moment the beast launched its repelling motion,
,and the collision of two overwhelming forces detonated into a secondary shockwave that swallowed the chamber.
Rethan jerked back instinctively, trying to clear the radius, but the wave hit him at once. It flung him like a rag doll, stole his breath, slammed him spine-first into searing rock, and dropped him hard onto the floor while he fought just to inhale.
For a few seconds, the world narrowed to pain, thunder, and trembling stone.
When he finally forced his head up, he saw something that froze his heart.
On the boss's armor,where the spell had landed,there was damage.
Small, but unmistakable. The stone had fractured, exposing a deeper glow beneath it,different from before. Unstable.
The boss staggered half a step.
That alone was enough.
"There," Caelan said with satisfaction, lowering his hands. "Did you see that? It works. We can hurt it."
Dorian and Lysand stared at the beast with renewed focus, their tension flipping into something closer to excitement. The proof was undeniable.
Rethan felt cold spread down his spine.
Because he wasn't looking at the wound.
He was looking at three bodies lying motionless near the boss.
His eyes went wide.
"What…" he started,then his voice broke.
He shoved himself up, ignoring the pain, and looked straight at Caelan. At Caelan's face, still wearing the certainty of victory.
"What the hell did you do?!" Rethan screamed, and the echo smashed off the chamber walls, riding the same deep, rising pulse of lava that now seemed to throb through the boss room itself.