Of the six of them, only Lily and Bernita were genuinely safe, both hanging at range where the Elder’s immediate aggro couldn’t easily reach them.

Lily’s arrows were landing for a few dozen points at best, barely a rounding error against whatever regeneration the boss was running in the background. And yet she kept shooting. Arms steady, eyes forward, entirely undeterred by the futility of it. There was something almost admirable about it, even if it made Don want to sigh.

He called over his shoulder while weaving between a pair of root slams, "Lily, the moment its aggro shifts to you, you run. Don’t hesitate. Use evasion if you have it."

Lily tilted her head. "Brother Don, how do I tell if it’s targeting me?"

"System settings. There’s a checkbox for highlighted hostile targets."

She nodded rapidly, then squinted at her interface. "Okay... it looks like it hates you the most right now."

Don had already moved. He broke wide and circled around to the Elder’s back, ducking beneath a swinging branch. Evasion was still cooling down, no safety net. He’d have to rely on footwork.

That plan lasted about four seconds.

The Treant Elder didn’t turn. It didn’t need to. A fireball bent around its own trunk like water flowing around a stone, arcing cleanly and slamming Don square in the back. He stumbled forward, vision flashing white.

[2,904!]

Low on health again.

Diana’s voice had an edge to it now. "Lily, don’t hold your ground against that. Run sideways and switch to a horizontal shot, you can’t absorb a hit like that."

Don straightened up, gritted his teeth, and forced a grim kind of optimism into his voice. "Don’t worry, Sis. Let it hit me. It can’t keep targeting the same person forever, right?"

A meteorite the size of a dining table dropped directly onto his head.

[3,000!]

"Pfft." Diana actually laughed. "You absolute jinx."

Don pulled out another potion, said nothing, and kept moving. There wasn’t much else to say. The situation was what it was, the boss’s big skills were lethal to anyone they landed on directly. The only reason nobody had died yet was because it seemed to spread its attention around, softening one target before pivoting to another.

That gave everyone just enough breathing room to recover between hits. Bernita burned through her mana potions in a steady, wordless rhythm, blue light flowing from her hands without pause.

Ten minutes in, the Elder’s health had dropped by less than a sixth.

Don did the math quietly. Roughly a million HP total. Easily the most durable boss they’d encountered in this dungeon, possibly anywhere. But they were still standing when Cappuccino finally jogged back into the room, slightly out of breath and muttering about his terrible luck.

He’d barely landed two attacks when everything changed.

The Elder stopped casting. Its enormous mouth began to move, not spitting fire, not summoning wind, just mumbling. A low, resonant sound, like something being recited from a very old and very serious book. Nobody could understand a word of it.

Then the silver flash came.

Three figures materialized from nothing, tree spirits, each about the height of a person, bristling with aggression. Level 27 elites. Don’s interface clocked them immediately: 180,000 HP, physical attack ranging from 700 to 770. They were already charging toward Lily and Bernita before anyone had processed what happened.

Don moved first. He slipped behind the nearest one, drove his dagger into its back, and tore away over 3,000 HP in a single strike.

The spirit wheeled on him with a sharp, rasping snarl.

Don immediately swapped to the Larsai Bow, opened up the distance, and called out without slowing down, "Lily, you’re quick! Pull the other two away from Bernita!"

Lily was already moving. She reached into the quiver at her hip, nocked two arrows simultaneously, and snapped off a pair of quick shots, one for each spirit.

Both of them lurched toward her. She turned and bolted, light on her feet, leading them in a wide arc away from the healer.

After putting a safe distance between herself and them, she glanced back. "Brother Don, why don’t I just kill these three? Get them out of the way?"

Don’s mouth curved into something that was half smile, half grimace. "Watch the Elder first."

As if on cue, two thick branches erupted from the trunk like arms and swung, not at Don, not at Diana, but directly into Yates’ face. Both hits landed with almost comedic gentleness.

[205]

[255]

Yates blinked. Then he started laughing. "Are you serious? That tickles."

"That’s why we don’t kill the adds," Don said.

Yates gave him a slow, respectful thumbs-up. "Noted. I would have just cleared them. Wouldn’t have thought twice."

The Elder adapted again. No more elemental magic, but it began calling in reinforcements.

Treants, leopards, a whole procession of high-level elites pouring into the space around it. The density of the summons was several times heavier than anything it had done earlier in the fight.

Lily started having trouble almost immediately. Five or six small monsters had locked onto her, and she was backpedaling, losing ground, her shots going wide as she tried to manage her footing and her positioning at the same time. Her face had gone pale.

Don tracked her situation while maintaining his own movement. "Lily, stop attacking. Run toward me. Watch where I go."

"Mm!" Her voice was tight, but she listened.

He started drawing them in deliberately, firing just enough to pull attention, then moving in broad, unhurried loops around the perimeter of the lake. One by one, the monsters chasing Lily began to peel off toward him. Within a minute, he had them all strung out behind him in a loose chain, following the route the environment gave him like passengers on a track.

Lily watched with wide eyes. "That’s incredible. So many of them, and you just, lined them all up like that. What do you call that move?"

"Running laps," Don said, without ceremony. "You follow the path the system lays out for you and keep a consistent distance."

"What about in the open world? When there’s no set path?"

"Then you make your own. Wild monsters drop aggro more easily, so you can’t sprint, you pace yourself and gradually shrink the circle. And keep a health potion ready in case your timing slips."

Lily’s expression brightened. "I’ll remember that!"