The ground beneath their feet shook with it, just slightly, just enough.

Lily, despite being new, didn’t freeze.

Before the Elder Treant had even finished waking up, she was already moving, darting across the lakeshore and sweeping every gold coin into her pack with the practiced efficiency of someone who had been running studios far longer than she’d been at this level.

In the time it took the others to orient themselves, the ground had been picked clean.

Bernita collected the two dropped items. The first was a pair of semi-transparent boots, green fluorescent chainmail, clearly part of a set. She unsealed them quickly and exhaled with quiet relief.

"Set bonus activated. Plus 350 HP and 200 magic defense."

The party’s tension eased a fraction. Bernita’s health now sat at 2700. Nobody expected her to tank what was coming, but they also couldn’t afford to watch her get erased in one hit by something they didn’t yet understand.

The second item was a skill book, its cover a deep, saturated green.

[Crush Strike] l: Deals damage equal to 150% of current attack power to a target in a blocking stance, ignoring the target’s physical defense.] [Cast Time: Instant.] [Cooldown: 12 seconds.] [Skill Grade: Lower.] [Required Level: 20.] [Compatible Classes: Swordsman, Mercenary, Knight, Berserker, War Wolf.]

"You two can roll for it," Diana said. "I already have the skill."

Cappuccino passed it directly to Yates without rolling. "Brother, your attack power is higher. The skill hits harder for you."

Yates accepted it without argument and opened the book.

The tremors intensified.

The lake in front of them churned and bubbled, roiling like water brought to a full boil, and a deep, gurgling moan rose from the Elder Treant’s gaping mouth, something between a groan of ancient wood and a sound that had no business coming from something that had never been alive in any ordinary sense.

Diana rolled her shoulders and stepped forward, longsword in hand. "Bernita, heal me from maximum distance. Stay back."

The Elder Treant answered before she finished the sentence.

Its mouth opened wide, and a massive lotus spat forward across the water, and from it erupted a towering arrow of ice-blue light that screamed across the surface of the lake and detonated squarely against Diana’s body.

The ice came instantly. It crawled up her armor in a thick, crackling shell, and her health bar dropped like a stone.

[2485!]

The young man stared. He’d seen mages pour every attribute point into intelligence and still not hit that hard.

Diana, encased from the waist down and visibly staggered, calmly uncorked an alchemical red potion and drank it while walking forward. By the time she reached the Elder Treant’s roots, her health was climbing again.

Bernita snapped off two healing spells and bolted, putting as much distance between herself and the boss as the instance would allow, a good instinct, as it turned out, because the Elder Treant had already begun tracking her with another cast before losing interest as the range grew too great.

Diana closed the gap and swung.

[Qiankun Strike!]

Her blade carved a deep arc into the Elder Treant’s bark with all the force she had.

[1205.]

Silence hung over the party for a half second.

[1205!]

Against a full Qiankun Strike from Diana.

The Elder Treant’s physical defense was monstrous.

It didn’t give them time to process it. A fireball bloomed directly overhead and crashed into Diana with a deep, resonant boom, throwing her two steps backward and sending heat rippling across the lakeshore.

[3058!]

Diana’s face tightened, the pain was real, high perception translating every point of fire damage into a burning sensation that cut through the interface. She gritted her teeth, swung twice in quick succession to hold aggro, and broke left, circling to the Elder Treant’s flank.

The three attackers moved at once. If Diana was sustaining this kind of punishment, they needed to pour on damage immediately before her cooldowns stacked against her.

They never reached it. 𝓯𝙧𝓮𝓮𝒘𝓮𝙗𝙣𝒐𝒗𝒆𝓵.𝓬𝓸𝒎

The Elder Treant’s gaze swept across the incoming wave, and shifted.

A new ice arrow formed above the water.

It caught Cappuccino dead center in the chest.

[Critical hit, 5092!]

He didn’t even have time to make a sound. His body dissolved into white light in an instant, scattering into motes before fading entirely as the rebirth sequence carried him back to the nearest city.

Then the sky darkened.

The young man looked up just long enough to see a meteorite the size of a water barrel falling from directly overhead, framed against the pale light of the instance canopy.

It hit him on the crown of his head.

The impact was total, a white-out of sensation, the world crashing to silence.

His health bar emptied in a single frame.

The damage number hung in the air like a red warning flag.

[2,790!]

Don was already running on fumes, but he didn’t retreat. Instead, he bit down on the potion he’d been holding in his mouth, cracked the glass with his teeth, and swallowed it in one practiced motion. His evasion skill triggered a half-second later, and the twin fireballs that followed scorched the air where he’d been standing, finding nothing but empty space.

Two silver-white beams swept over him from behind, Bernita’s heals, arriving with her usual quiet efficiency. The numbers climbed back up. Not enough to feel safe, but enough to keep fighting.

Diana wiped the sweat from her forehead with the back of her wrist. "Everyone stay sharp. It’s rare to run into a magic boss this tanky. This is going to be a long one."

From the team chat, Cappuccino’s voice crackled through with its characteristic gloom. "Wait for me, I’m on my way back. Had the worst luck today, I swear. Save me some loot, at minimum I’m getting a couple pieces of silver-level gear out of this."

Nobody responded. They were all too busy surviving.

Don’s normal attacks were chipping away at roughly three or four hundred damage per hit, and the boss’s health bar looked like it hadn’t moved. Without any visible attributes to reference, nobody had a real read on its total HP or what it might do next. A wipe was entirely possible, one bad sequence of skills and the whole team could collapse in seconds.