Winston looked at Zelda and read the panic in her soul.

He had seen it the moment they walked through the cavern, the way her eyes had moved across the Level 50 corpses outside the pagoda.

She had been calculating what kind of fight produced that, and what that fight might have done to the person who walked into it alone.

"Zel. What I need to do won’t take long... so go through with the rest, I’ll be right behind you."

"If you’re staying, I’m staying."

Her voice was flat and the conversation was over before it started.

Winston looked at her for a moment, then exhaled.

"I’m staying as well."

Winston turned to find Freya already standing beside Zelda with an expression that didn’t invite discussion. He looked between the two of them and accepted it.

"Fine.... You two can stay."

Mark had opened his mouth to say something. Winston caught it and turned to him before he could.

"I know you will be fine leading everyone out."

Mark went quiet. He had wanted to stay, that much was visible.

But Winston’s tone left the same amount of room it always did for that kind of request, which was none.

Mark looked at Zelda. She didn’t object so he gave a single nod and turned to face the gathered survivors, and when he spoke, his voice carried across the throne room without effort.

"Listen up."

Every head turned.

"The guardian has been defeated and the gate is finally open." He let that land for a second. "Three days of surviving something we had no business surviving and we’re all walking out of here. Back to our families. Back home."

The cheer that followed wasn’t clean or coordinated. It was ragged, emotional and completely genuine.

Some people cried. Several of them had watched classmates and colleagues fall to monsters that had no business being in what was supposed to be a Tier One First Entry.

The trauma of the past three days didn’t disappear with a speech, but the relief of it being over was real, and it came out of everyone at once.

Mark waited for it to settle slightly, then turned back to Winston one last time.

Three days ago, Winston had been nothing to him.

A Fortunate.

The bottom of the class. The kind of person Mark had spent six years treating as background noise.

But a Fortunate had pulled him back from death on day one that had been Zelda.

And a Fortunate had cleared a Tier Three beacon, while Mark had been managing logistics from inside a secret realm.

’I need to apologize properly.’

Despite his intentions Winston, Zelda, and Freya had already turned away. Mark filed the thought away, made a quiet promise to himself, and stepped through the golden gate.

The survivors followed him through one by one until the throne room was empty except for three.

The throne room was quiet now. Just three of them and the corpse of the Blood Emperor.

Winston walked toward the headless body slowly, eyes on it, the Yari still in hand.

Freya and Zelda watched him from where they stood without moving, reading something in his pace.

He stopped beside the corpse and turned back to them.

"Do you sense it?"

Both Sacred class holders paused. Freya closed her eyes without asking what he meant, letting her senses spread outward toward the body.

A few seconds passed.

"It feels like an absence," she said. "Like the body isn’t actually there. Something’s missing from it that should be present."

Zelda’s expression shifted, it was not confusion exactly, but the particular look of someone who had just realized they couldn’t contribute to a conversation.

Her Realization dealt with force and impact, not sensing. She had nothing to offer here and she knew it.

The dejected look that crossed her face was brief but visible.

Winston noticed but he left it alone. Acknowledging it would only make it worse.

He turned back to the corpse and let the weight of what he was about to say settle before he said it.

"The guardian was originally Level 140."

The throne room went silent.

"What?" Freya and Zelda said it at the same moment.

The numbers clicked into place fast.

Level 20 was the ceiling for Rank One. Level 45 for Rank Two. Level 95 for Rank Three.

A Level 140 monster sat firmly in Rank Four territory and they were lthe equivalent of a mid-tier Exalted class holder.

That classification existed above Champion, above everything these three had ever been expected to encounter in their first years as class holders, let alone days after their First Entry.

The shock wasn’t really about the number. It was about the fact that Winston was standing in front of them.

Freya recovered first. She looked at him directly, asking the question they were both carrying.

"How did you kill it?"

Winston looked at them both with the most straightforward expression he’d worn since entering this pagoda.

"I forced it out of the guardian zone to reduce its level. Then I blinded it to remove the illusion ability. After that I deactivated and immediately re-summoned my weapon; it couldn’t track the recast through its echolocation ability. So it couldn’t react in time as my spear went straight through him."

Silence.

Zelda and Freya stared at him.

Neither of them spoke for a long moment. Not because they didn’t understand what he’d said, the words were clear enough.

It was the simplicity that stopped them. Three steps. Force it out, blind it, catch it off guard with a weapon recast. 𝓯𝓻𝒆𝙚𝒘𝓮𝙗𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝒍.𝙘𝓸𝙢

That was the framework that had brought down a Level 140 Rank Four guardian.

That tactic wasn’t in any academy curriculum.

It wasn’t in any combat manual Freya had ever studied, and she had studied extensively under some of the best monster combat instructors in Key City.

The concept of using a guardian zone’s level penalty as a deliberate tactical tool, combined with sensory denial and a permanent spell’s deactivation window had never been presented to her as a viable strategy against anything, let alone something at that rank.

"You came up with this yourself?" Freya asked.

"In the heat of the moment. I didn’t have another option."

Freya went quiet. That answer was somehow more unsettling than the tactic itself.

She had spent years being trained for situations like this.

Winston had spent three days in the Astral Heaven and improvised a kill method for a mid-tier Exalted equivalent on the fly.

Zelda said nothing.

She was looking at Winston with an expression that sat somewhere between pride and the resigned acceptance of someone who had known him for six years and still somehow kept being surprised.

Winston saw that neither of them had follow-up questions and turned back to the corpse.