[C-Rank Dungeon found.]

[C-Rank Dungeon: Forgotten Mountain.]

[Recommended Level: 24.]

Kai arrived in front of a C-rank gate at five in the morning. No lines because barely anyone is awake.

Perfect.

He stepped through.

[C-Rank Dungeon: Active.]

The dungeon opened into uneven terrain with stone ridges and sharp drops and paths that curved rather than ran straight. The kind of layout that required constant adjustment rather than a consistent rhythm.

The first creature came fast.

Dog-sized but longer through the body, covered in dark chitin with too many legs moving in perfect coordination.

[Chitin Stalker.]

[Level 20.]

Kai moved, and the blade arrived, and the Stalker dropped before it had finished its approach. The second and third came from the ridges on either side, and he took them in sequence without breaking pace.

[Consecutive Chain: Active.]

The chain started immediately.

Every monster that emerged died before it could slow his pace. After the fifth row of monsters, the dungeon stopped.

The air changed, and the usual monster sound that should be echoing out wasn’t there anymore. Kai paused before he began glancing around and felt something was very wrong in this area.

This wasn’t normal.

He recalled what happened recently and turned toward the exit.

Then the movement came. Not from the dungeon but from behind the ridges and above the terrain, and from angles that did not belong to the dungeon’s layout at all. People. Weapons already drawn.

Ten.

Fifteen.

Twenty.

Thirty of them.

Kai read the spread in one pass.

Left flank. Five, long-range builds, hands already warming. Right flank. Four, same configuration. Center. Eleven, melee range, positioned to cut off retreat if the flanks failed. Above on the ridges. Three more he could see, probably two he couldn’t.

It was designed for a person who moved fast, fought solo, and would try to break through rather than negotiate.

It was designed for him, someone had made this trap for him. Kai’s eyes narrowed in realization when he saw a familiar tall man walking forward.

Ironpact!

The tall man stepped out from behind the nearest ridge and waved at Kai with a grin. "You’re hard to reach," he said.

Kai looked across all of them in one pass. How many could he move through before the ones at the edges responded?

"You’ve become a pest," Kai said.

Nobody laughed.

A few of them shifted their weight, and one of them muttered something under his breath that sounded like "he’s smaller in person," but the tone was wrong for relief. More like disappointment that the thing they had been preparing for was actually here and real instead of safely contained in video footage.

The tall man’s expression didn’t change. "You still don’t understand your position," he said.

Then the ground shook hard enough that two of the Ironpact members on the ridges lost their footing entirely. One of them slid three meters down the slope before catching himself.

The shaking did not stop but intensified with a low grinding sound!

Kai’s head turned, and he saw not one or two but dozens of bull-shaped creatures with thick bodies and spiked backs charging through the lower section. There were too many to track individually anymore.

Just a wall of moving flesh that made the ground shake. Dust fell from the ceiling in streams, and small rocks started bouncing across the floor with the rhythm of the approaching stampede.

Each one crashed through ridges and made them collapse. The air was full of dust so thick you could taste stone when you breathed. He understood immediately. They had not spawned naturally. The Ironpact had done this on purpose by herding all of them in this direction for the ambush.

You keep refusing to cooperate." The tall man smiled slightly. "So we adjusted the approach."

"I don’t care." Kai said as he assessed the options in the space of two seconds.

His mind formed an image: the cloak, vanishing from their line of sight, slipping past the outer ring before they reacted. But the image kept ending the same way, struck down by the long-range magic on his left and right.

And then another image formed, which had him running towards the stampede.

’So be it.’ Kai thought just as the players on his left and right got ready to unleash their attacks on him.

He thought of Sera.

[Class Emulation: Valkyrie - Partial.]

The Fractured Blade shifted with the edges catching light and holding it differently, and he released a compressed burst outward in all directions. A flash that lasted half a second and hit everything in the immediate radius at the same time.

The half-second was enough.

Several Ironpact members had their hands up before they processed what had hit them.

All of them were blinded as Kai moved toward the creatures instead of away from them. And someone screamed, "Where is he?" in a voice that was too high and too loud for someone who had believed this was a controlled operation.

Another voice yelled, "he’s gone," and then immediately corrected to "No, wait he’s moving" and the corrections kept coming from different directions as people tried to track something they could not see.

Their vision was still full of white spots, and the tall man was shouting orders, but nobody was listening.

Panic didn’t stop them from firing anyway.

The attacks rushed upwards and smashed into the ceiling, shaking the area. Before then, rocks began falling downwards as he kept moving.

[Class Emulation: Pulse Fist - Partial.]

The Fractured Blade shifted into its pulsing configuration, and he drove a strike into the stone ridge to his left. The ripple spread outward through the rock a half-second before the blade made contact, and the stone shattered outward in a wide spray of debris. He stepped through the opening before the dust settled.

Then a barrage of flames, wind, and ice came toward him.

He thought of Dorn.

[Class Emulation: Guard - Partial.]

A shield of compressed force formed in his other hand with the Fractured Blade adapting to a secondary configuration, and the next barrage hit the construct and cracked it. He summoned another.

Another hit.

Another crack.

Each one lasted seconds, but it was enough. As he finally closed in on the bull monsters and leapt over their charge. TThe nearest bull noticed him a half-second too late. He landed on the bull’s back at full speed, his feet finding the narrow gaps between spikes automatically.

Not carefully. Fast, the way you cross unstable ground when slowing down is the more dangerous option.

The bull snapped its head back and found empty air.

He was already on its shoulders. He was already at its back.

"What the—"

"He’s on them!"

"How is he—" and another person finished the thought.

"He didn’t do this in any of the videos!" One of them shouted like they had studied every piece of footage available and built their entire tactical approach around patterns that Kai was now casually ignoring.

One of the ranged attackers on the right just lowered his hands completely and said. "That’s not possible..."

He was already in the air, pushing off toward the next one, which had begun to turn but hadn’t finished when he landed.

Behind him, the first bull’s momentum carried it sideways into a ridge, and the collision was not a single impact. But a cascade, as the bull’s weight collapsed the ridge’s base, and the entire structure came down in sections.

Each falling piece hit another bull, causing another collision and another change in direction. Within three seconds, the surrounding terrain was shaking so hard that stone dust was falling in sheets. One of the upper ridges just gave way completely and sent two Ironpact members sliding down into the chaos below, where they had to roll aside to avoid being trampled.

But then above Kai.

A barrage of attacks appeared, quickly crossing the distance through the air. Below him, twenty tons of uncontrolled creature momentum were moving in the exact direction his enemies had been standing.

He jumped to the third bull and kept going.

Above him, more attacks were raining down in coordinated barrages. Below him, the churning mass of creatures moved like a living avalanche. Around him, debris fell from sections of the dungeon that couldn’t take the structural load of dozens of enraged bulls moving at full speed.

He thought of Rin.

[Class Emulation: Thread Caster - Partial.]

The Fractured Blade’s edge dissolved into taut threads, and he sent them outward toward a falling slab of stone, the tension wrapping around it precisely and pulling it sideways into the path between him and the next concentrated barrage.

The slab took the hit and shattered violently.

He was already moving through the space it had cleared.

A strike grazed his side.

Pain flared.

He kept following the pull of his blade. He thought about Leo telling Hana to believe it. About a twelve-year-old who had not once considered the possibility that he was wrong.

The distortion led him down the best path available through absolute chaos. Then he leapt over another bull, the gap to open space narrowing ahead of him, and pushed for it.

"Cut him off! Don’t let him through!" He landed on the far side of the creature mass, rolled once on the uneven ground, recovered instantly, and kept moving deeper, away from the outer ring and the barrage coverage.

The noise dropped behind him.

Still there but distant.

Kai slowed to a pace that was sustainable rather than maximum and let his breathing settle. His side was reporting the graze from earlier in specific terms. He assessed it as manageable and set it aside.

This wasn’t the normal pressure tactic. But one meant to either forcibly make him join them or bury him here.

"How did they guess I would do this C-dungeon?"

Either they had predicted his route perfectly, or they had spread ambush teams across multiple gates.

Neither answer was good.

Their reach and commitment to taking him down.

He was pulled out of his thoughts by the sounds of footsteps echoing through the dungeon. They weren’t in a rush but were instead taking their time. The pace of people who believed they had already won and were simply completing the process.

Kai looked at the dungeon ahead of him.

[External Attention: Sharply Increasing.]

[Scaling Effect: Accelerating.]

[Distortion Output: Rising.]

He looked at the distortion notification and thought about thirty people who had studied his footage, mapped his routes, and built a scenario designed to remove every option he had.

They had given him an audience of thirty.

Thirty people who would survive to tell the story.

Or not.

He almost laughed.

Then he started moving. Not away from the footsteps but deeper in, toward the part of the fight that hadn’t happened yet. They wanted to force his hand, then they would experience what happens when one tries to trap him.

Behind him, a woman shouted. "He’s going deeper!"

"After him! Don’t let him—"

"Are we really doing this!?"

"Yes! Now shut up and follow, or you will be explaining why this operation failed."

"Damn it!"

’Good,’ Kai thought. ’Let them follow.’

Let them see what happened when you cornered something that was still learning what it could become.

The dark and deep dungeon stretched ahead. They’d brought thirty people to trap him. He wondered how many would make it back out.