The dungeon opened into the sky.

Not a cavern or a corridor or a flooded ruin. Actual open sky, pale and vast, with massive stone platforms drifting through white clouds at different heights and broken ruins hovering between them. Wind roared through the gaps between platforms constantly, and far below, the clouds churned over an abyss with no visible bottom.

Kai stood at the entrance and looked at it.

"Sora suggested the livestream," he said.

Sera was already studying the platform layout, her Valkyrie armor dimmed to its resting glow.

She glanced sideways at him. "I know... Is that the person you’ve been sending our runs to?"

"Yeah. I told her to keep a watch out for the stream around this time if we do it."

She looked out at the nearest platform, at the wind tearing through the gap below it, then back at him. "Okay. Then we can’t fail in front of that many people."

"How many do you think will watch?"

She found the small display he had mounted at the entrance and looked at the number on it.

[Live Viewers: 1,204,992 and rising.]

The number kept climbing while they stood there as if people were calling other people to come watch. She went quiet, and her eyes stayed on the screen a beat longer than they needed to.

"Oh," she said.

He had been watching her face. Her jaw didn’t drop. She didn’t laugh or shake her head. She stared at the number for a second too long.

Working out what it actually meant.

"Yeah," he said.

She turned back to the platforms. "We still can’t fail."

"No," he agreed.

They walked forward into the wind.

...

Sora had been covering C-rank gates all morning when the notification hit her second screen.

She looked at it once to confirm that it said what she thought it said.

"He’s actually alive," she said, and pulled the stream to her main display. Her viewer count spiked immediately. She brought up the dungeon profile on the adjacent screen.

"Sky Grave Dominion. Recommended level forty. Three teams have attempted this dungeon since the announcement. Two came back out. One did not." She looked at Kai’s stream, at the floating platforms, at the two figures already moving. "And he decided this was the one to go live for."

The first creatures came from above.

Five massive humanoid figures covered in black feathers and silver armor plates dropped through the cloud layer without warning, talons sparking against stone when they landed.

[Sky Talon Warrior.]

[Level 38.]

They were fast. The first one crossed the platform before Kai had finished reading its name, and he was already turning, talons cutting through empty air behind him. A wind spear hit the stone where he had been standing, and the section dropped away. He was on the next platform, the Fractured Blade already buried in the nearest Talon’s shoulder joint.

[Recalculation Initiated.] [Distortion Applied.]

[Drop Quality: Optimized.]

[Amplification Complete.]

Sora leaned toward her screen. Kai moved into the second wave, and something about the way he did it made her stop talking. Two attacks came at him from different angles, and he went between them, not around either one. His feet found the only line through.

He didn’t look like he was searching for it, but he moved like the path already existed.

She paused her commentary.

Her chat ran for several seconds without her.

"No matter how many times, I see it. It’s still shocking how smooth he moves and evades the monster attack." Sora said lightly.

More beautiful! Now if he only wore a suit and some black sunglasses—

Hahaha!

"Still looking at it a bit closer. It feels like it’s his body that is reacting. Look at that." Sora leaned closer. "He keeps finding paths that shouldn’t exist. But the funny part. Kai doesn’t look rushed anymore, like panic had simply stopped applying to him."

Even the chat seemed to pause.

Then the clouds split overhead.

The boss came down through them, and the chat stopped asking questions entirely.

The Air Duke came down slowly, and that was the worst part.

It had six arms and silver armor that floated loose around its body without attaching to anything, and where its legs should have been, there was only wind, spinning so fast the nearest platforms began to shudder before it had even landed.

[Air Duke.]

[Level 43.]

The Air Duke turned toward Kai first, as if it already knew which of them mattered more.

It raised one hand.

Every platform left in the dungeon cracked at once. Stone broke into gravel, and the gravel went over the edges, and the wind that rushed in to fill the space was not just air but pressure, a wall of it, shoving everything outward toward nothing.

Kai and Sera skidded back twenty feet across crumbling stone before they caught themselves, and by then the Air Duke was already throwing, all six arms working at once, compressed air strikes coming from every angle with no space left between them.

Sera pushed off a breaking edge and hit the Air Duke’s right arm cluster with a burst of golden light. The boss took it and fed it back into the wind around its body, using her attack to make it harder to reach. Three arms came back at her. She went through a cloud bank and returned with her plating cracked down one side, already knitting back together.

Kai ran what was left of the terrain, jumping from one collapsing section to the next, each platform falling the moment he left it. His body was finding the path. He wasn’t choosing it so much as following what the distortion had already worked out ahead of him.

Even the chat stopped moving.

Then his foot came down on nothing on a rock that was crumbling before pushing off it. His body shifted as he evaded other falling rocks and landed on a fragment of stone that had no business being reachable from where he had just been standing.

The whole thing took less than a second.

Sora replayed the clip twice. "No," she said quietly.

The stream slowed.

"That wasn’t reaction speed." She leaned closer toward the footage. "It looked like he already knew which mistake the dungeon was about to make."

The line spread before she finished saying it.

Clips appeared everywhere.

Forums changed titles in real time.

Everyone had noticed it.

Sora was just the first person willing to say it out loud. The dungeon bent around him in ways it didn’t bend for anyone else.

The Air Duke pulled all six arms inward and threw them outward at once. The platforms cracked apart and fell away, and the wind that came in to replace them was not just wind but something solid, a pressure that shoved at everything from every direction. There was no good place to stand. There was no standing at all.

Kai had already moved.

He quickly took out the Dark Explosion sword from his inventory. Dark energy erupted around the weapon as he twisted mid-fall and drove the weapon downward.

The blast detonated beneath him.

The platform beneath Kai shattered apart while the recoil launched him across the collapsing gap like a projectile, black energy ripping through the air behind him.

The angle was insane.

Too high and he would overshoot. Too low and he would fall short into the abyss below. And for half a second, even Sera thought he had miscalculated.

Then the distortion pulled him.

His arm shifted half an inch before impact, the blade adjusting at the last possible moment like something unseen had grabbed the strike and corrected it.

Kai’s sword crashed through the center of the Air Duke. And then he switched to Fracture Blade and pulled everything he had left into a single point and activated the emulation.

[Class Emulation: Flame Swordsman - Partial.]

He drove the sword down through the center of it again.

The heat followed the blade inward, and the wind that made up the boss’s body lost its shape, the spinning slowing, the pressure dropping, the six arms going slack and then gone.

The storm collapsed.

The sky above the platforms opened up blue and quiet and still.

[Drop Quality: Optimized - Peak Accumulation.]

[Reward Scaling: Increased.]

[Dungeon Cleared: Duo.]

[Level Increased: 34 to 36.]

[+2 Stats]

[True Fans: 317.]

[Scaling Effect: Intensifying.]

Kai stood in the quiet and read the last notification twice.

Three hundred and seventeen.

Eighty-seven when the stream started, and three hundred and seventeen now.

He had felt the difference before he saw the number. The distortion had started responding faster the moment the viewers believed harder.

He stood in the quiet and watched the value update until it stopped meaning anything, then closed it.

Sera landed next to him. One side of her armor was cracked through, the gold plating split from shoulder to hip.

She looked at him. "That was either creative or completely insane," Sera said before looking over the abyss below the broken platforms. "...You could’ve missed by a mile."

Kai looked at the Fractured Blade for half a second.

"Yeah," he said quietly but deep down, he knew the jump had never been a gamble.

She nodded once and started walking toward the exit, and he followed. The platforms were coming apart behind them, stone dropping away in pieces, the sky the dungeon had built losing its color and going white, and then nothing.

They ran through the gate and into the city air, and the crowd that had been watching the stream on their phones looked up at once, the way crowds do when the thing they have been watching from a distance suddenly arrives in front of them.

The gate came down, and another blue light appeared in the skyline. His rank updated as he watched, reaching rank 13. Raze was still number one and Victor had reached rank 4. He looked out at the crowd, at the phones still raised, at the stream still running somewhere with Sora’s voice carrying over all of it.

’Good,’ he thought, watching the crowd. ’Keep watching.’