Seeing it get restless, Diana’s attacks quickened. Her voice sharpened. "Everyone push faster. If it breaks free, we lose the advantage."

From the team chat, Bernita’s voice came through, steadier than anyone expected. "I’m almost there. Less than ten minutes."

Ten minutes. Don measured the Elder’s remaining health against the crumbling walls and said nothing. It was going to be close.

It wasn’t close enough.

The Elder’s aggro swung to Cappuccino without warning. He reacted fast, genuinely fast, and bolted immediately. But fast wasn’t the same as fast enough. The fireball caught him mid-stride, a massive bloom of orange that sent the damage number spinning overhead.

[Critical hit, 5,388!]

Cappuccino vanished. One frame he was there; the next he wasn’t.

The Elder didn’t pause. Its attention moved immediately to Yates, who was already moving, feet hammering the ground in a full sprint. He was quicker than Cappuccino, by any reasonable measure. It didn’t help. The meteorite came down from a steep angle and caught him square, and the number that appeared was just as final.

Yates crumpled. The Samsara team was down to one.

Then one became none, as the Elder found Diana next. She caught the first strike, barely, taking just under three thousand damage, and survived by the thinnest possible margin. But surviving wasn’t the same as being okay.

Don glanced at her health bar and felt the knot in his chest tighten.

Just him and Lily now, and Diana running on fumes at the edge of the fight.

He kept his expression level. The Elder still had roughly ten percent of its health bar left. Not much, in the abstract. Everything, in practice.

"We’ve almost got it," he called out. "Don’t stop."

He couldn’t see Lily from his position, the Elder’s trunk was too wide, too tall, too completely in the way. But he could hear her in the team chat, the rapid, shallow breathing, the rhythmic snap of arrows being nocked and loosed. She was frightened. She was also still shooting. He’d take that combination.

The mud walls were cracking now, long fractures running up both sides of the passage. Every time the Elder lurched, another piece broke loose. It was a countdown with no numbers on it.

Diana had found her rhythm. She couldn’t match the range, her bow topped out at fifteen meters, and the Elder’s casting range extended a full ten meters past that, so she worked the gap instead.

Step in, fire, step back, let the skill fizzle against the retreating distance. It was meticulous, exhausting work, and she made it look almost effortless. Don watched her footwork and recognized something in it that couldn’t be taught quickly.

She’d been doing this for a long time.

At five percent health, the walls gave out.

Both sides collapsed simultaneously, a dull crash of falling mud and splintering wood, and the Elder lurched forward, free.

Its eyes found Lily immediately.

"Lily, back the way we came in! All the way out!" Don’s voice carried the full weight of urgency without quite breaking into a shout.

Lily didn’t hesitate. She turned and ran, and she was fast, genuinely fast in the way dark elves always were, long legs eating up the ground in clean, fluid strides.

Don and Diana fell in behind the Elder, firing as they chased it, which meant three parties were now running in the same direction through the dungeon at different speeds for very different reasons. Don was aware of how it must have looked and decided he didn’t care.

Lily reached the teleportation array at the entrance, her fingers touching the surface in one smooth motion. Silver light pooled beneath her feet.

Don and Diana split without a word, peeling off in opposite directions as soon as Lily was clear. The Elder slowed, confused, its targeting logic cycling between them.

Don felt the gap between himself and the boss and was acutely aware that humans were not built for this. In Realms Online, the human race sat comfortably in the middle of the speed rankings, which was a polite way of saying they were slow compared to everyone interesting. Dark elves were in a different category entirely. He could feel the Elder behind him in a way that had nothing to do with game mechanics.

Its aggro locked onto him.

He keyed the team chat without slowing down. "Lily, come back in."

Her voice returned, bright and only slightly breathless. "Hehe, Don, is this really how you play with a boss?"

"It chased me first," he said, which was technically accurate. "Diana, get outside. You’re almost at a level threshold and you don’t have evasion. One bad crit and you’re done."

"I’m not leaving."

"This isn’t the time for,"

"I’m not leaving."

He tried a different approach. "You’re twenty-seven years old. You’re acting like,"

"You," Diana said, with remarkable composure for someone running from an ancient tree, "deserve a thorough beating."

Don gave up. There was no arguing with someone who had decided to be immovable about being immovable. He saved his breath for running.

The three of them kept the Elder cycling for another five minutes, its hatred orbiting between them in unpredictable arcs, never landing long enough to finish anyone off. They chipped away at the last sliver of its health bar one careful shot at a time. It felt almost manageable.

Then the Elder opened its mouth and roared.

It wasn’t a skill. It wasn’t an attack. It was just sound, a deep, resonant blast that rolled across the lake and through the trees and reached the ears of every single monster Don had carefully deposited on the other side of the dungeon.

They came.

All of them, at once, in a single surging wave.

Don saw it happening and had exactly no good options.

The Elder’s aggro found Diana in the same moment. She was far out, she’d been careful, she’d been running good lines, but careful and good weren’t enough when the ice came shrieking in at that angle. The critical hit registered before she could react.

[Critical hit, 4,902!]