Then she fired a wave. A breath. Whatever she did with her chest and her open hands sent a forward-rolling tide of furnace heat across the Cavern at the lead boss in a wall that was not meant to stop the beast, because nothing she could shape was going to stop a creature that big. It was meant to cook it as it came.

The boss’s lowered shoulder met the wall of heat at full charge.

The Cavern lit white.

Red-gold flash flooded the chokehold and washed every face on the line out into pure overexposure.

The beast’s plated shoulder seared on contact, gray hide blackening and curling backward in a meter-wide crater that ate through plate and into mountain-bone underneath, four eyes squinting shut against the heat, the front rank of low-tier behind it cooking to ash in the splash, the abyssal floor under both Scarlet’s feet and the beast’s path now a long ribbon of slowly cooling magma where dry rock had been a heartbeat earlier.

The boss’s hide caught fire across its right side and stayed lit, mountain-bone burning like a forge that had been given fuel.

Then the beast’s mass carried.

Heat could cook. Heat could not stop. The boss was wounded, its right side an inferno that was not going out, but its forward velocity had only barely slowed and it was still coming, charred shoulder dropping deeper into the wave of furnace air with the kind of commitment that said it had eaten worse and walked through it.

Scarlet’s heat held the wall as long as she could pour into it, but mass against mass was still mass, and she did not have any.

"Gh!"

The collision lifted her.

Her body launched off her own footing in the same arc the beast’s charge had been carrying her on, fire still streaming off her shoulders as she went, the dome of radiant force around her unraveling into trailing ribbons that curled behind her tumbling form.

The watching line’s stomachs dropped as Scarlet went up at a speed that should have ended on the cavern wall, and the wall of heat she had been firing collapsed with her departure.

Nyx was already on it.

Inside the dome where the rest of the line had been positioned, Nyx’s hands had come up before anyone else had even processed the launch. Space folded along Scarlet’s tumbling trajectory, the air bending in a smooth curve that caught the Flame Monarch’s flight at the apex and decelerated her over a meter of compressed distance into a controlled rotating drift instead of a high-speed impact with the cavern wall.

Scarlet hung in midair, suspended in the haze, her hair a slow molten orange spread around her face and a thin line of dark blood running from her nose down across her smiling lips.

She licked it off.

"Ahh, this big boy’s got some spunk in him!"

Her grin had not gone anywhere. The blood on her lower lip and the damage on her ribs were not, as far as her face was concerned, things worth being upset about. The redhead was, somehow, having the time of her life.

The lead heavyweight had also paid.

Its seared shoulder smoked and wept thick black ichor that hissed where it dripped, the exposed bone underneath still on fire and showing no sign of going out.

The two of them had hit each other for real. Scarlet was airborne with injured ribs and Nyx’s hands holding her up. The boss was burning. Both were absolutely still in the fight.

That was when Vespera sighed.

"Stop playing around."

The Shadow Monarch’s lattice came alive.

The shadows that had been braided through every vertical surface of the chokehold for hours unspooled in a single coordinated motion as her right hand lifted by a fraction. The cables came down on the lead heavyweight from above and behind, hundreds of them, woven into a hooked latticework that punched into the seared wound Scarlet had carved.

Charred bone drove deeper into the beast’s own torso under the weight of the strike.

The lead beast roared. Vespera pushed.

Mountain-born mass and all, the boss monster was shoved bodily across the abyssal floor on its heels by a force that came at it from inside its own wound, gouging the seared crater wider with every meter, and the lead heavyweight’s reverse-trajectory ploughed through the second and third heavyweights behind it in a cascading collision that sent all three of them stumbling backward into the column of low-tier reinforcing through the gate.

The Shadow Monarch’s other hand lifted. Shadows peeled off the chokehold’s vault and split into hooked blade-shapes mid-flight, raking across the beast’s exposed flank in a series of opening cuts that drew long lines of black ichor in parallel. Then she carved the same lattice across the second beast’s shoulders. Then the third.

The Shadow Monarch was attacking now.

Scarlet rotated in the haze, oriented herself, and Nyx released her.

Behind the three heavyweights Vespera and Scarlet faced down, the gate flickered again.

Two more silhouettes cleared the threshold a beat behind the first three, lighter in build but built for speed, and a third presence followed them with a heavier tread. Proper soldiers.

The rank Kaiden had pegged as the bulk of the Claimant’s actual force based on what he saw in the awakened combatants’s streams attacking the creature while it greedily suck up the dungeons. They cleared the Safe Zone in long bounding strides and angled toward the line.

The two Monarchs’ real fight had begun, and the Claimant had decided it was a good time to commit more weight.

Inside the dome, the line saw it all.

They saw the Flame Monarch hit a wall and bounce off it grinning. They saw the Shadow Monarch sigh once and then start carving a boss monster across the floor of the Cavern with shadow attacks that drew real blood.

They saw some of the strongest fighters on humanity’s side, both at the absolute peak of what humans had ever achieved, finally fighting properly against creatures that could match them, and they saw what it looked like.

The hunger landed in every chest on the line at the same time.

Not fear. Not envy. Not gratitude either, although the gratitude was there underneath. What landed was deeper. Older. Hungrier. They had been the small fries for too long.

Aria’s silver eyes had gone still and cold. Luna’s grin had pulled flat. Bastet’s tail had stopped twitching. Nyx’s fingers had curled into white-knuckle fists at her sides. Calypso’s chest was rising and falling fast, the demoness already feeling it before she could put a word on it. And inside the halo above Kaiden’s head, Alice’s light had brightened by another full step.

It was the same feeling, identical, in every one of them.

Kaiden felt it land in his own chest.

This mindset of theirs was, by every objective measure, completely insane.

Three months ago, Kaiden Grey had been an F-tier awakened killing slimes and wolves to scrape together enough points for his level up.

Three months. Less than a hundred days from awakening to the front line of a Dungeon Master Battle that was now being broadcast to thirty million viewers and climbing.

Every researcher on the planet was, at this very moment, picking apart the data on Kaiden’s group and failing to explain it. The numbers did not match any growth model on file.

Conventional awakened took years to climb out of the low tiers. Top-percentile prodigies took months. The Awakened Association had standing observation programs on three continents whose entire purpose was tracking outliers, and Kaiden’s gang had broken every curve on every chart simultaneously. The official theories were "anomalous," "statistically impossible," and "under further investigation."

The unofficial theories ranged from "the Ashborns are an alien bloodline" to "Kaiden is the reincarnation of a divine entity."

By every standard humanity had, Kaiden’s group were superstars of growth, anomalies and phenomena the data did not know how to explain.

By their own internal standard, they were nowhere near where they needed to be.

Watching two Monarchs bleed against creatures the gang would have had no choice but to run from with their tails tucked between their legs was, for them, not a moment of awe.

It was a benchmark. And the benchmark was an insult.

It was time to correct that.