"Argh...! Fuck! How did we all die before even reaching the boss room?!"

After one and a half hours of struggling inside the Hell Dungeon, the Young Master’s party was forced out—all of them with their HP sitting at exactly 1 point.

Proof that they had all died inside and been ejected by force.

Hell difficulty was unlike the other modes.

In there, as long as one party member remained alive, dead members would revive on the spot where their corpses were and could continue clearing without issue.

But there was one significant catch.

Revival took five minutes per death.

Once the entire party died within that same five-minute window, they would all get ejected from the dungeon simultaneously, the attempt marked as a failure. And as further penalty for dying, they would be barred from re-entering for the next hour.

Thus, this party could only sit and stew while waiting for the cooldown to expire.

"Fuck!" The Young Master cursed again, driving his boot into the ground as he vented his frustration. "If not for my guild holding back WhiteGod’s party, this would already be a hopeless case!"

He swept his glare across his party members, all of them ragged and worn from getting beaten down by various monsters and stacked status conditions.

"You’re all trash! After I equipped you with all that rare gear, you still dare to die before me?!" He roared.

"W-We’re sorry, Young Master..."

"We are truly lacking."

"Please forgive us, Young Master. This won’t happen again."

All of them looked thoroughly pissed internally, but still performed subservience without flinching. After all, if not for this rich brat funding their operation, they would all be nothing but money-sink game addicts with no income and no direction.

They didn’t particularly vibe with the Young Master as a person—not even close—but they weren’t about to let go of this little golden goose handing out free meal tickets just to keep his ego cushioned.

"Speaking of... Where the hell is Arthur’s team?!" The Young Master growled, scanning the surrounding area.

There should’ve been a few members left at the dungeon entrance for communication purposes. However, right now, other than his own battered party, nobody else was present.

The area in front of the dungeon was empty in the specific way that suggested something had already happened here.

"I told them to leave someone here for updates... They’re getting a pay cut when they get back—"

"Y-Young Master...! It’s bad!"

But just then, one of his party members raised her voice sharply.

A woman wearing what looked like a nun’s outfit, similar in style to Eri’s. Her trembling fingers were pointed directly above the dungeon entrance, her lips shaking as if she’d been standing out in a winter mountain storm all day.

"Huh? What now?"

Irritated but curious, the man glanced up—and gasped.

"N-No way..." He whispered. "How did they...?!"

His eyes went wide, locked onto the fresh entries that had appeared on the leaderboard. One on Easy difficulty, and one on Normal difficulty. Both of them glowing with the particular brightness of newly claimed first-place records.

[Howling Dungeon Easy Difficulty Rankings:

1. WhiteGod’s Party - 33 minutes 40 seconds

2. None

...

]

[Howling Dungeon Normal Difficulty Rankings:

1. WhiteGod’s Party - 33 minutes 18 seconds

2. None

...

]

Like a brazen advertisement, Kamishiro’s party name sat at rank one on both boards—clean, undeniable, right there for anyone in the vicinity to read.

The Young Master couldn’t believe his eyes. For a moment he genuinely thought he was seeing things. He rubbed his eyes. He pinched his thigh hard enough to leave a mark. But no matter what he did, the display didn’t change.

Soon, shock gave way to comprehension.

Then comprehension gave way to flaming, volcanic rage.

"Those fuckers!!!"

He growled, the word coming out low and tight in the way that meant something had snapped behind his eyes.

"That bastard Arthur let them get past, and on top of that he let them clear both Easy and Normal before us?! Useless trash! I don’t need such trash in my Justice Guild...!"

The rankings had practically been his. They had been sitting right there, waiting to be claimed. And then Kamishiro’s team had reached in and taken them from directly under his nose—casually, efficiently, and apparently without breaking much of a sweat.

Nothing in his memory had felt more personally embarrassing than this.

Just as he was mentally composing Arthur’s punishment in vivid detail, he noticed changes getting updated on the third board—the Hard Difficulty rankings.

[Howling Dungeon Hard Difficulty Rankings:

1. WhiteGod’s Party - 1 hour 1 minute 1 second

2. None

...

]

"WHITEEE GOOOOD!!!"

The next moment, the Young Master’s face turned blood red. A shade that suggested genuine cardiovascular concern.

He could feel the anger rising to levels he hadn’t touched before—not just at losing the first clear, but at the time posted.

That number. An hour, one minute, and one second. Set with the casual precision of someone who had been keeping an eye on the clock and decided that particular timestamp was funny. It felt mocking even if it wasn’t meant to be, and that somehow made it worse.

"Everyone!" Still, he wasn’t about to do nothing. "WhiteGod dares to steal from me—he doesn’t want to live! Prepare for battle! We’ll kill him the moment he appears here...!"

"Yes!" Everyone replied without delay.

As hired guns, his party fell in without question, not daring to push back.

Of course, despite agreeing without hesitation, they were already fully aware of how this was going to end.

’Even if we surprise attack WhiteGod, I’m sure we’ll get wiped in under a minute...’

’That Impenetrable Shield Arthur even got sent to respawn. There’s no way we can handle this.’

’Ahh... Mom. Looks like I’m losing my source of income again!’

Their thoughts were varied, but all pointed toward the same conclusion.

Winning was impossible.

A party that could clear Hard difficulty in just over an hour—when their own estimated clear time was around three hours—was operating on a completely different level. The strength that Justice Guild’s analysis team had painstakingly compiled was already far from their actual peak.

And that analyzed number alone was already twice what this party could output on a good day.

"Get ready! Here they come!"

The Young Master shouted, his grin returning as he spotted six pillars of light descending nearby. Then the light faded, and human figures took shape.

"Fuck, those bats were so unfair!"

"Ahh... we died..."

"Boss Henry! Y-You were here?!"

"Sorry, Boss, we failed to reach the boss room on our end."

To his surprise, the ones who had appeared were the second team assigned to Hell difficulty. They had died and been kicked out of the dungeon themselves, arriving at exactly the wrong moment to witness the leaderboard situation in real time.

Although disappointed, the Young Master quickly waved a hand and ordered.

"Move and recover! Use potions! We will intercept WhiteGod’s party the moment they return!"

"Huh...?"

The newly arrived party spent a few confused seconds reading the room—glancing at the leaderboard, at the others shaking their heads helplessly, at the Young Master’s thunderous expression. The picture assembled itself quickly enough.

"Yes, Boss!"

They moved without further hesitation, fanning out to the other side of the dungeon exit and establishing a flanking position around the spawn point.

If Kamishiro’s party was going to come out, they would come out into a box.

Although they had failed in Hell difficulty, that didn’t mean they were weak players by any stretch.

Several of them had made names for themselves across other competitive titles. A few were former E-Sports players, their mechanical execution sharp and reliable in the way that only came from years of high-level play. As a combined unit, they were formidable by any reasonable metric.

Still, not a single one of them carried any genuine confidence about what was coming.

Only the Young Master, Henry, dared to actually entertain the idea of killing something that had started calling itself a god—and living up to it.

The two parties didn’t have to wait long.

As Kamishiro’s team finished the boss, sorted their healing, and checked out the loot, they exited cleanly. But the moment they stepped out and the light cleared, Kamishiro noticed something was wrong with the arrangement of figures waiting for them.

He didn’t wait to confirm it, as the thick bloodlust alone was enough to wake him up.

"Breeze, Sanctuary!" He commanded immediately.

Eri, caught off guard by the sudden order, blinked in confusion for half a second.

Then the light resolved around her and she saw what was already in motion. She began casting without another moment’s hesitation.

But the other side had already seized the initiative.

"Attack!"

All sorts of attacks launched across the short distance between them.

With only a few meters separating the two groups, there was barely any room to observe, let alone properly dodge. Still, Kamishiro wasn’t about to let the girls absorb any of it.

"Cloud, Kristal, take care of the back! I’ll handle this side!"

The moment the words left his mouth, he drew a new weapon with his left hand.

A small, light, and versatile blade—longer than a knife but lacking the mass of a proper sword. A rapier. A weapon built entirely around speed, precision, and the idea that hitting first mattered more than hitting hard.

Kamishiro’s eyes narrowed as he tracked the incoming volley.

The fastest projectiles were moving at roughly 50 meters per second. At this range, that translated to a fraction of a second of reaction window. No margin for error, no room to recalculate mid-movement.

"Huff...!"

He took a sharp breath, stomped forward, and whipped the rapier out in a wide swirl—tip tracing a tight, precise spiral as it extended. Then he cancelled the motion clean, and swept it upward in a single smooth arc.

"Eye of the Storm!"

The next moment, a tall tornado erupted between his team and the attackers, appearing in a literal instant. Powerful enough that the surrounding forest reacted instantly—trees bending hard, leaves stripped clean from branches, the sound of cracking wood cutting through everything else.

Every incoming attack was caught in the vortex and redirected, slamming into random patches of forest, into the ground, into each other—anywhere but where Kamishiro’s team was standing.

He looked, for all intents and purposes, like a war god holding back a tide with one hand.

Deep inside, however, his heart was hammering.

’Fuck! Lucky I made it in time!’ He thought.

It wasn’t the prospect of dying that had rattled him—he could handle a full party or two by himself well enough. What had his pulse spiking was something far more logistically annoying.

’If any of the girls had died, that’s 30 minutes of waiting for them to run all the way back here again!’

...It wasn’t born of arrogance.

Just practicality.

Just scheduling concerns.