The ice arrow struck Diana’s chest and sent her to her knees. She made a soft sound, almost inaudible, and the ground came up to meet her.

Something cold settled over Don. Not panic, something quieter and more purposeful than panic. He turned and charged directly at the Elder from behind, and the killing intent that rose in him felt less like rage and more like clarity. The boss had single-digit health. There was nothing left to calculate.

He hit it hard.

The Elder’s targeting swung to Lily. Don looked across the dungeon and saw her standing still, not retreating, not panicking, just standing with her feet planted and her bow raised, watching the fireball close the distance.

He didn’t call out a warning. He already knew what she was doing.

The fireball hit the wind before it hit her. Her evasion skill flared, and the fire broke apart against it like water against stone.

"Resistance!"

Then she shot.

The arrow crossed the gap in a fraction of a second and buried itself in the Elder’s back with a sound like a hammer striking wet wood. The backstab precision was exact, the right angle, the right timing, the skill triggering clean.

[Critical hit, 4,782!]

The Elder shuddered. It didn’t fall.

It turned and went after Lily.

She ran, and it followed, and Don ran after it, and the horde of monsters ran after Don, and the whole absurd procession crashed through the dungeon in a ragged, sprawling chain, an ancient tree chasing a girl, a young man chasing the tree, and a small army of elite monsters chasing the young man for reasons that had long since stopped being personal.

In the team channel, Diana’s voice came through softly, amused despite everything. "So what exactly is happening right now?"

"It’s almost dead," Don managed between breaths. "Everyone get ready to come in."

A pause. Then, from what sounded like most of the team at once: "It’s down?"

"Any second now."

Lily reached the teleportation array again, silver light gathering at her feet, and she stopped. She turned and looked back at Don, really looked, past the monsters and the chaos and the distance, and her expression was clear and steady.

"Brother Don," she said quietly. "You don’t have a way out of this one."

He glanced back. The horde behind him was dense and close. The Elder was between him and any exit. She was right, and they both knew it.

He smiled. "Go through. Watch my health bar. The second it starts dropping fast, come back in and finish the last point of health it has left." He held her gaze for a moment. "You can do it."

Something passed between them, not quite understanding, not quite trust, but something that contained both. Lily touched the array and disappeared into light.

Don turned back to the Elder.

He waited for the backstab cooldown with the patience of someone who had done this before and knew that patience was the only tool that mattered now. When the timer cleared, he closed the gap in three strides and drove the strike home, precise, clean, almost everything the boss had left evaporating in one hit.

The Elder screamed and spun.

Don triggered his evasion skill and let the magic break harmlessly against it, then struck again. His health bar was fine. His health bar was fine.

And then it wasn’t.

The monsters reached him.

The pain came all at once, not one hit but a dozen, stacking faster than his health bar could track. He felt it as a wave of heat and pressure and the sharp, specific awareness that the numbers were going the wrong way very quickly. His right arm shook. He was bleeding from inputs he couldn’t keep up with. The dungeon tilted at an angle that had nothing to do with the geometry of the space.

He hit the Elder one more time.

The strike landed ugly, off-angle, his form compromised, the arc of the blade anything but clean. But it landed. It always mattered that it landed.

"Lily," he said, and his voice came out steadier than he felt. "Come in."

Don’s final strike landed true.

The last sliver of the Treant Elder’s health evaporated, and the ancient tree shuddered from its roots to its crown. In the same instant, the experience flooded in, a cascade that didn’t stop at one level or two but kept climbing, the numbers ticking upward until they settled.

[Level 25.]

Don had exactly enough time to register that before the Elder’s dying fireball found him.

There was no casting animation, no warning. Just the heat, and then the number hanging in the air above his collapsing figure.

[4,572!]

Full health to nothing. He turned into white light on the way down.

He materialized in Brno Village with the quiet, disorienting suddenness of respawn, one moment fire, the next the familiar dirt road and the smell of woodsmoke. He checked his level. Twenty-four. The death penalty had taken one back.

He stood there for a moment and let the frustration settle.

Twenty-four was still good. Better than good, honestly, he’d taken down a heavily reinforced boss a full tier above him, solo, and the experience curve had reflected that generosity. But the dungeon had almost certainly reset the moment the last living party member left it. Lily had been outside. The instance would have read itself as empty.

Everything on the floor in there, gone.

The team chat was silent for a long stretch. Even the people who’d been playing this game long enough to know that bad endings happened sometimes didn’t seem to have much to say.

Diana spoke first, practical as always. "Don’t be discouraged. We all came out of that dungeon with real experience gains. Nobody walked away with nothing."

Yates exhaled audibly. "I was literally two minutes out. Two minutes." A pause. "Don, that was genuinely rough luck."

"No regrets," Don said, and mostly meant it. "The mission’s the only thing we didn’t finish."

Then a voice cut through the team chat like a wind chime dropped on stone, light, clear, and carrying an unmistakable note of injury.

"Would it have killed anyone to ask me whether I actually went back inside before jumping to conclusions?"

The team went still.