Diana glanced over with something close to approval in her eyes. "That’s worth turning into a proper lesson. Some of Sword Song’s archers and mages could really use it, their kiting is a mess."

Don deflected it easily. "I learned from better players than me."

Diana let a beat pass. "Star and Mane’s team ran at a pretty high level back then."

The comment was light, conversational. But Don caught the weight beneath it. She was placing him in a context, quietly framing his competence in front of the Samsara players, giving him standing without making it obvious. It wasn’t something you did for a stranger you’d run two dungeons with. He filed it away without comment and kept moving.

They ground the Elder’s health down past the halfway point, then past the one-third mark. And then, with roughly one-fifth of its HP remaining, it shuddered.

The roots that had anchored it to the lake floor for the entire fight suddenly tore free.

The Elder moved.

Don observed it with a bit of surprise. In all his years of gaming, he couldn’t recall ever seeing anything quite like it, the ancient, gnarled tree hauling its own body forward on a tangle of thick roots, lurching toward Bernita with surprising intent.

"Bernita, run!"

Three seconds passed. Bernita stood frozen, the warning taking too long to reach whatever part of her brain processed danger. When she finally turned, the Elder was already mid-cast.

Two spells, back to back, delivered with businesslike efficiency.

An ice-blue arrow. A sphere of deep red flame.

Both hit. The numbers appeared over Bernita’s head in sequence.

[2,598!]

[2,896!]

She made a small sound and collapsed.

The Elder’s gaze, if a tree could be said to have a gaze, shifted immediately to Lily.

To her credit, Lily had already read what was coming. She was running before the Elder had fully turned, heels kicking up dirt and water as she bolted for open space. The Elder went after her at a slow, relentless walk, its root-legs churning forward with unsettling determination.

Don watched the Elder’s movement speed and felt something click. "Lily, lead it to the fork where we killed the Wind Tree Spirit!"

She understood immediately and veered left, nodding as she ran. Then, with characteristic Lily logic, she turned around and fired two arrows back at the Elder to top up its aggro.

"Silly girl," Don called after her, half-laughing, half-exasperated. "It’s already completely focused on you. You don’t need to remind it."

The rest of the team fell in behind, repositioning toward the fork. Don, however, couldn’t follow, not yet. He still had half a dozen of the Elder’s summons in tow, strung out behind him in that long, obedient chain.

But he had a plan for that.

He adjusted his angle and broke into a full sprint heading in the opposite direction, away from the rest of the team, putting real distance between himself and the monsters behind him. In the open world, distance alone wasn’t enough to drop dungeon aggro. But distance combined with stealth, that was a different calculation entirely.

It was a technique that every rogue and stealth archer eventually internalized, the kind of trick that got passed down through guild chats and coaching sessions rather than any official tutorial. Don had never played a rogue himself, but he’d spent enough time around people who had. Some knowledge just soaked in, whether you asked for it or not.

He watched the stealth icon on his skill bar. It sat dark and unavailable while the monsters were close, locked out so long as he remained in active combat range. As the gap widened, the icon began to brighten, pixel by pixel, like a lamp warming up.

The monsters behind him slowed, losing the thread.

The icon turned fully bright.

Don drew a breath, tensed his arms, and let the skill carry him. His outline softened at the edges, colors bleeding outward, his shape dissolving gradually into the texture of the dungeon until there was nothing where he’d been standing, just stone, water, and the distant sound of his footsteps fading into silence.

The elite monsters stood frozen in place, milling about in aimless circles, completely stripped of purpose. Without a target to track, they were nothing, big, dangerous, and utterly directionless. Don watched them from the shadows for a moment, then turned and slipped away toward the fork.

Lily had already done her part beautifully.

The Treant Elder, driven entirely by its obsession with the dark elf girl, had lumbered straight into the narrow passage at full stride, and promptly wedged itself.

The entrance was nowhere near wide enough for something its size. Its roots scrabbled against both walls, but it couldn’t push through and couldn’t pull back. It just stood there, enormous and furious, locked in place like a cork in a bottle.

Lily had already retreated to a safe distance on the dungeon side, and she was laughing, bright, unguarded laughter that carried across the whole chamber. 𝒻𝑟ℯℯ𝑤𝑒𝑏𝑛𝘰𝓋𝑒𝓁.𝒸𝑜𝘮

The team looked at each other and broke into grins.

Even Diana smiled, a rare, unguarded thing, lips curving upward just enough to show two neat rows of white teeth.

"Right then," she said, rolling her shoulders. "Let’s settle some grievances."

Cappuccino was already swinging, his halberd crashing into the Elder’s trunk in a furious rhythm, chips of ancient bark flying with each blow.

Don kept his eyes moving. The situation looked easy. That was exactly when it wasn’t.

"Watch the aggro," he said, cutting through the laughter. "It’s stuck, but it can still lock targets behind it. The moment it shifts to you, move."

The words had barely left his mouth when the Elder’s attention snapped directly onto him.

He was already running, evasion skill triggering mid-stride, and the ice arrows dissolved against the skill’s field before they could connect. He exhaled and circled back to a safe angle.

The Elder was getting restless. It twisted and heaved inside the narrow passage, roots gouging deep channels into the mud walls on either side. The passage had never been built to hold something like this, yellow mud and packed earth, not stone. Under that kind of sustained force, it was already starting to shift.