The room was high-ceilinged with the ground catching the low light in patches. But Kai’s attention was on the monster. It was two meters tall with grey skin pulled tight over heavy muscle, spikes rising from its shoulder plates and crimson eyes.

[F-Rank Boss: Ironjaw]

[Level 10.]

Same level as the Feral King. He relaxed his grip slightly and moved forward.

He activated the emulation and flames burst around his blade as he prepared to quickly end this. Kai closed the distance and struck, the flaming blade rushed down.

The Ironjaw tried to dodge out of the way but the distortion swiftly shifted the attack. And then the blade arrived at the point where the creature’s guard was thinnest rather than the point Kai had aimed for.

The compressed heat released into the gap between two of its shoulder plates. The boss staggered with blood leaking from its mouth as inside of its gray body, an orange light appeared. Kai pressed forward without pausing, landing two more strikes at the same gap before the Ironjaw could recover its footing.

It roared and swung.

But he moved inside the arc, hit the ribs twice, and stepped back.

The distortion was reading the fight cleanly as he continued slashing into the Ironjaw. Each hit made it roar out in pain before finally it rushed back after the blade carved into its shoulder.

The Ironjaw glared at Kai before then lowering its head. Kai frowned and held his ground, wondering if the monster was planning for another attack or trying to bait him. And then he saw it, the monster’s body began trembling as its breathing rang out louder.

"What in the–"

Something shifted in the Ironjaw’s crimson eyes. The cold, locked-on focus cracked open into something rawer and hungrier, like a door coming off its hinges.

Then its chest split open.

A massive mouth appeared with razor sharp teeth and a crimson glow. The spikes on its shoulders grew bigger while its whole body doubled in size. And finally its crimson eyes turned pitch black as it glared at Kai.

[Ironjaw Level: 10 to 16.]

Kai read the number and took one step back. "Level sixteen in an F-rank dungeon."

That shouldn’t happen.

He had the emulation running and the consecutive chain intact but no information. Six levels was not a gap he could bridge by pressing the same approach that had been working in the passages outside.

The Ironjaw moved before he finished the thought.

It blurred across the room.

Kai barely got the blade up.

The punch crashed through the flaming sword and into him, and the floor left his feet. Then the wall. The air went out of him all at once, stone through his back and shoulder before the floor even registered.

He got his arms under him and pushed up as his body screamed out in pain. But his grip on his iron sword still held.

The Ironjaw was already crossing the room again.

The second hit came before he was fully upright. Worse than the first and he went down hard. The Ironjaw grabbed him by the throat and lifted him off the ground.

But Kai stabbed its arm.

The heat barely pierced its defense.

It only made Ironjaw angrier.

It threw him into the floor hard enough to crack the stone, then pinned his leg before he could do anything and raised both fists overhead.

[Condition Met: Near-Death Threshold.]

[Distortion Amplification: Active.]

Something shifted as the room sharpened around him. He saw the Ironjaw tensing muscle, the gap on where to attack, and spaces he couldn’t see before. The heat over his blade had intensified even more like it was getting ready to explode.

For one terrifying second—

Kai couldn’t tell whether the distortion was helping him survive... or simply refusing to let him die yet.

But he knew he only had one chance.

He didn’t try to get free.

He drove upward as the fists came down. The blade found the one angle that reached the gap in its armored chest. The blade crashed through the Ironjaw at point-blank range.

The Ironjaw froze.

The red light flickered once and went out, like the strike had reached whatever powered the transformation and pulled it free. The expanded muscle lost its structure, the weight of it hitting the floor in sections.

The room went quiet.

[Recalculation Initiated.] [Distortion Applied.]

[Amplification Complete.] [Drop Quality: Optimized.]

[Dungeon Cleared: Solo.]

[Level Increased: 6 to 9.]

Kai stayed where he was for about forty seconds and let his left side finish its report. When the acute phase settled into something he could categorize and carry, he got up and looked at what the Ironjaw had left.

The drop was significantly above what a standard Ironjaw clear would have produced. Iron and silver weapons and armor alongside fragmented stones and claws. Then he saw the weapon sitting apart from the rest and picked it up.

[Item Acquired: Fractured Blade (Unstable) — S-Rank Weapon.]

[Effect: It adapts to the user’s thoughts and power they use. When combined with a person’s class, it can enter a second stage to unleash twice the damage]

He read it twice and then equipped it. 𝑓𝑟ℯ𝘦𝓌𝘦𝘣𝑛𝑜𝓋𝑒𝓁.𝑐ℴ𝓂

The blade was long and black with cracks along the lower half, dark light leaking from them in slow pulses. He could feel it wasn’t stable in the way you feel something with a flaw before you can see where the flaw is.

He swung it once to test the weight. But then his arm was pulled further and faster than he’d directed. He stopped and tried again with the same result.

[Adaptive Response: Active.]

"You’re reacting to my thoughts? That’s how you’re anticipating me."

Every direction he slashed to in his mind, Fracture Blade would already be pulling in that direction.

He thought about what that meant across different class emulations.

"You’ll be useful," he said. "And dangerous."

Then his mind shifted back to the Near-Death threshold. It was a terrifying new condition that would save him but wasn’t something he could rely on. And then his other distortions had given him a good picture on their functions and how they worked together.

But he still didn’t fully understand it.

He could feel it, he hadn’t reached the ceilings for these distortions yet. Then he thought about why this boss had a second stage and how it could jump levels. He wasn’t sure if it was because he touched a special condition or because this dungeon was a special F-rank one.

Kai stepped back through the gate and the city came back around him. Daniel’s group was about twenty meters away in various states of aftermath. Burns on two of them, a cut along one arm, Daniel himself standing with his blade down and the specific frustration of someone who had just had a harder run than expected.

Daniel looked up and saw Kai. His eyes went to the gate collapsing behind him and then back to Kai’s face.

"You went in alone," Daniel said.

Kai didn’t answer because the answer was obvious.

"You cleared it." Less a question than someone reading a result they hadn’t prepared for.

"He cleared it?"

"Alone?"

"That fast?"

"Isn’t that the same as yesterday—"

Kai was already moving past the group when something caught his attention.

A phone was pointed at him. Not at the burned players, not at the collapsed gate, not at Daniel. At him specifically, with the focused framing of someone who had already decided what they were looking at was worth capturing.

He looked directly at the camera.

The person behind the camera forgot to breathe. A couple of seconds passed before they kept recording.

Kai held the contact for three seconds before looking away and he kept walking. There were things he needed to do. He wondered what the footage was going to look like from out there. The person with no class clearing a F-rank dungeon that even a team of players couldn’t.

Especially a team who had a rare class.

He had seen images like that take on a life of their own before. Once something was moving through the networks, it didn’t matter anymore what the person in it was actually like. The image became the whole story.

He already knew it would spread.

The only real question was how fast.