Kai’s body was kicked to the side.

Forcing him to roll on the ground as a massive sword crashed into the door and shook the entire room.

Sera rushed over to him and quickly helped him up as he looked to see the boss moving. The monster was fifteen feet of fused bone and plates. It had four arms with only three carrying a weapon but then he saw it grabbing the flaming blade it hurled.

The air near the blade shimmered with heat.

And then he saw the second blade which made the area go cold. The third made the dust on the floor tremble. The fourth made the space around it feel smaller than it was.

It turned toward them.

The eye sockets were empty, and it looked at them anyway.

"Four weapons," Sera said with a frown. "And they seemed to all be rare weapons."

[Undead General.]

[Level 37.]

Kai read the level and felt his assessment of the next few minutes shift considerably.

The General raised all four arms at once.

Fire wrapped around one sword. Ice crawled along a massive scythe. Wind howled around a spear. Dark energy crackled across the fourth blade in deliberate patterns.

Then it moved.

The flaming sword came down.

Kai’s body moved before his mind caught up. The distortion pulled him sideways and gave him half a second of grace. Then, superheated steel shattered the stone where he had been standing.

Fire spread across the floor in every direction.

The heat hit him like an open oven, close enough that his eyes watered and each breath came scorched. Before he could find his footing, the wind spear was already moving, the air around its point shrieking, and he threw himself sideways but not far enough.

Sera’s armor caught most of it. The light around him cracked, and the force punched through anyway.

Kai’s couldn’t breath as pain flooded through him and he was blasted back a bit. He straightened up and looked at the fracture running through the armor, then back at Sera.

"Noted," he said.

His ribs had filed their first complaint, and the light armor Sera had given him was already cracked along one side. The General hadn’t moved from its original position once.

She was already gone, moving to his left.

The General gave them no pause. The flaming sword came in flat and wide, while the ice scythe dropped from above, the two arcs meeting at every angle he could have taken. There was nowhere to go but in.

Kai ran straight at it. He dropped under the flaming blade with inches to spare, close enough to smell his own hair burning. Then the cold hit, the scythe passing just over his shoulders and leaving frost across his jacket and a deep numbness spreading down through his arms. His muscles seized for a half second, legs going wooden under him.

Kai forced himself forward anyway.

He dropped to his knees and drove his hand into the floor.

[Class Emulation: Pulse Fist — Partial.]

The ripple burst upward

Traveled through stone beneath the General’s feet and cracked the terrain. Threw its weight forward just enough to break the rhythm.

"Sera, now!"

Sera’s sword crossed the chamber in a streak of gold, and the General caught it on the dark energy that detonated on impact. The impact threw them both off their feet. Stone dust rained from somewhere above. Kai hit the floor rolling and came up with his ears still ringing and and the General was already moving again.

The wind spear moving toward Sera, flaming sword swinging wide toward him.

"Switch!"

They ran toward each other and crossed at the center. Sera’s armor lit up gold when the flaming sword came down, and the stone under her cracked and split outward in long lines. Kai ducked under the wind spear and came up swinging hard at the General’s side.

The General pulled the thrust back mid-motion and turned the blade to knock his strike away. The force went straight up through Kai’s wrist and into his shoulder, and for a second, his whole arm felt wrong.

Both of them were out of position with the General between them. Sera’s legs trembled from the flaming sword impact, and his sword arm was still half-numb from the blocked strike. The chamber was already worse than when they’d entered.

Fire along the left wall, stone split in long lines across the center, and the General showing no sign that it had spent anything at all. Before either of them could reset, the ice scythe and the explosion sword were already moving. One toward each of them.

[Class Emulation: Guard — Partial.]

Kai pulled the steel shield from his inventory and got it up just as the scythe came down.

The impact traveled straight through the metal and up both arms. His fingers went numb. Cold crawled from his hands to his elbows, and his bones ached deep in a way that had nothing to do with the weight of the blow. The shield cracked apart in his grip.

It bought him one second. Sera used it as she drove a sword of light across the chamber, and the General stepped clear of it in a single motion, a full body length sideways, far too quick for the weight it carried.

The strike hit nothing.

Then the dark explosion sword started glowing.

"Sera, move!"

The blast was nothing like the smaller detonations from the Ashen Knights. Stone erupted in massive chunks. Heat tore through the chamber in every direction. Kai grabbed Sera and pulled her behind a section of collapsing debris.

Fire swept past on both sides. The shockwave punched through the debris anyway and hit him in the ribs, and for a long moment, breathing was something he had to think about.

He did a quick check and felt his body was still working even though some parts were screaming in pain. Sera had blood running from her nose and was holding one arm at a slightly wrong angle.

They had landed hits twice in the last two minutes, but the General had walked through both of them.

Then footsteps echoed slowly through the flames.

The General emerged from the explosion untouched. The fire that had just shattered stone moved around it like water around a post, and it came through at the same pace it had gone in, unhurried, already raising its weapons.

"This thing is insane," Sera said beside him.

Kai spat blood and felt the rest of it catch up to him at once, the pain and the weight and the way his vision kept trying to close in at the edges.

[Condition Met: Near-Loss State.] 𝘧𝓇ℯ𝑒𝓌𝑒𝑏𝓃𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘭.𝒸ℴ𝓂

[Distortion Output: Rising.]

Kai’s heartbeat suddenly sounded too slow.

The General stopped moving.

Not because it was stunned.

Because it was staring at Kai.

Then slowly all four weapons lowered as though something ancient inside it had recognized him.

And then it rushed towards him with the glow of its sword amplifying.

But something already settled behind Kai’s eyes as the movement of the Undead General became slow to him. The General swung the explosion sword, and Kai watched the upper right arm drag just slightly on the follow-through.

Same recovery lag.

Every time.

The ice scythe pulled back, and he saw the weight roll into the back foot before the blade committed. The hand on the wind spear loosened and then tightened again just before the thrust came.

For the first time, he could keep up with its movement, and that meant his distortion could punish it.

"Sera," he said. "I need thirty seconds."

She looked at him. Bloody nose, one arm held wrong, light armor cracked in three places.

"Twenty-five," she said, and walked directly into the General’s next attack.

Kai moved towards the side to hide away.

The General vanished from sight.

The distance between them disappeared in a way that had not happened once in the previous twenty minutes.

He was not in position when it arrived.

The wind spear and ice scythe came together perfectly, aimed at two different angles with no gap between them. Kai moved sideways, and the spear grazed his shoulder while the scythe carved through the wall behind him, freezing the entire section white.

The room was half-destroyed with fire still burning in two corners. Smoke drifted across the frozen wall in black ribbons. Frost covering the far wall white, the floor cracked and uneven from five separate explosions.

The General pivoted toward Sera.

Flaming sword and explosion sword, both arms driving toward her at once. She met the flaming blade head-on with her armor fully deployed, but the exploding sword hit her side and sent her crashing across the room.

The General moved immediately toward where she landed.

Kai activated the cloak.

His body disappeared from sight, and the General stopped for a second, and he sprinted across the side wall and launched from a broken section of floor and drove his blade across the creature’s arm. Dark blood ran down the ancient armor. Not deep enough to disable anything but enough to pull its attention back.

"Sera!"

"I’m up!" Light erupted from her position as she came back into the fight.

After that, they stopped fighting separately.

Sera pulled the General’s attention, and Kai hit it from the side, and then they switched before it could corner either of them. Her armor absorbed two strikes that were meant for him. He cut off its angles twice before it could push her into the wall. The chamber kept breaking apart around them, and the General kept walking through it.

The fifth time the explosion sword came down, the lag was there again. Upper right arm, same length, same place.

Every time.

[Class Emulation: Thread Caster – Partial.]

Threads shot from the Fractured Blade toward broken debris scattered across the floor behind the General. The General lunged toward Kai, and he pulled hard, debris collapsing sideways directly into the creature’s path. The explosion sword destroyed it instantly, exactly as planned, and the upper right arm entered its recovery lag.

[Class Emulation: Pulse Fist – Partial.]

The ripple detonated beneath the General’s footing, cracking the terrain upward and shifting its balance in the exact window the lag created.

Kai drove forward, and his blade found the joint between the upper right arm and the shoulder at the moment the arm was out of sync with the others.

The joint twisted.

"Sera!"

She was already moving.

Kai drove the General back one step at a time, cutting off every angle it tried to take, pushing it toward the section of floor that had been splitting open since the first explosion. The cracks spread wider under its weight. Then the floor gave, and the General went over backward, arms swinging, and Sera was already above it.

The sword that formed over her head was not like the ones she had thrown in the corridors. Those had been precise. This one was not built for precision. It came down like a verdict.

She looked down at the General. It looked up at her with empty eye sockets.

"Fall," she said.

The light swallowed everything. When it cleared, the General was in pieces across the floor, each one still.

The silence that followed was sudden and total.

Kai let out a breath and took stock.

His ribs hurt with every inhale, while his shoulder had gone from pain to nothing and back to pain. He ran his tongue across his teeth, found all of them, and decided that counted for something after the last twenty-five minutes.

Sera landed ten feet away. Her nose still bleeding, one arm held slightly wrong, and the light armor had dissolved completely, nothing left in it, the Valkyrie class spent to its limit.

They both looked at what was left of a level thirty-seven boss scattered across a half-collapsed chamber.

Then Sera laughed, and Kai blinked in surprise. "We actually did it," she said.

"You were doubting us?"

"What do you expect? It was beating us easily."

Kai didn’t say anything, just looked at the four weapons lying still across the chamber floor, the elemental energy already fading from each of them.

Kai looked at the scattered remains, then slowly smiled. "True."

And then the chamber trembled.

Kai and Sera froze before gripping their weapons and leaning against each other. But then they noticed it wasn’t the dungeon collapsing or another enemy appearing.

But the four weapons of the General were shaking as they rose. Then all four weapons slowly turned toward Kai.

Like they had finally found the person they belonged to.