A cold rush of air, a clean displacement, and "MISS" floated up where Diana should have been struck.

"Sister Diana," He grabbed her arm and pulled. "Get out. Go back to the city, now."

Diana took two deliberate steps and pushed him aside instead.

The halberd meant for her took Don across the side, and it was Diana who fell for the third time.

Something ignited in Don’s chest, not tactics, not calculation. Something older and less patient than either.

"Fuck your mother!" he shouted at the Bone General, his voice raw.

The White Bone General let out a low, contemptuous laugh, raised its hand, and prepared to bring Diana back a fourth time.

Don stopped caring about composure. He looked at the boss, looked at the silver light gathering in its outstretched palm, and made his decision.

Today, it ended, one way or the other.

The fury radiating from the players around Don was palpable. The White Bone General had crossed a line. A player ranked in the top five on the level leaderboard had just been stripped of three levels by this single boss. The injustice of it hung in the air like coal dust.

The General seized the opening and swung his halberd in a devastating arc. Don was ready this time. With no evasion skill available, he threw himself into a backward somersault, feeling every vertebra in his spine protest the movement with a chorus of cracks and pops. He landed in a crouch, grimacing. He was not a gymnast. His back had no business bending like that.

The Bone General’s red eyes tracked the movement and locked onto him. The halberd swung again. Don twisted away, breaking into a series of tight, rapid footwork patterns that kept him just ahead of each strike. In Realms Online, agility governed both hit rate and evasion in nearly equal measure, with only the thinnest margin left to chance. Don had spent years as a mage before his class change, and mages with low health pools learned footwork out of necessity. That habit had followed him into his rogue build without losing a step. His feet traced small circular arcs along the Bone General’s flanks, weaving wave-like patterns across the ground. A style better suited to close quarters than V-steps or Z-steps, and far harder to predict.

Diana watched from a distance, momentarily forgetting the fight. "Good heavens," she muttered. "Tian Ge has possessed him."

"Sister Diana," Don called back without breaking his rhythm, "I’m never taking you into a dungeon again."

She laughed, which was either brave or infuriating under the circumstances. "Are you really angry? It’s only a three-level drop. What’s there to worry about?"

Don lowered his voice so only the group could hear. "Everyone listen. Take advantage of this and get clear. Don’t attack. Don’t let this boss wipe more levels off anyone, understood? Just get out of the way."

Yates looked almost offended. "Brother Don, give me some credit. What’s a few levels? Sister Diana gave them up without flinching. You think I’d do any less?"

Bernita nodded firmly beside him. "You can always level up again, Brother Don. That’s not what matters right now."

Before Don could respond, the White Bone General’s halberd swept wide across the battlefield. Don was half a second too slow. The blade caught him across the chest and tore through.

At one hundred percent pain perception, the sensation was beyond description. A mouthful of blood hit the air. The numbers 3485 and 3785 burned above his head, and then the world went dark.

He came back to awareness in pieces, a strange, drifting sensation, as though something was pulling at the edges of him. Then warmth, soft and inexplicable, settled over him like a blanket. He lay still for a moment, confused. A boss of this tier shouldn’t have a forced awakening skill. Those belonged to the endgame, to the nightmare-grade encounters in the game’s later Chapters. And players brought back by forced awakening were supposed to feel it, disoriented, resentful, full of grinding pain. Don felt none of that. Only quiet. He wasn’t sure what to make of it.

The thought was still unfinished when he stood up, and the halberd drove into his chest again.

He went down a second time before he’d drawn a full breath.

Lying in the coal dust, staring up at the dungeon ceiling, Don ran the numbers in his head, and the numbers were bad. Every death stripped levels. If this continued, everyone in the group would pay a serious price. Diana, Yates, Bernita, and worse, Kira and Lily, who had come to Liverpool with nothing to their names and were counting on their positions at Extraordinary Studio to hold their lives together. If their levels were gutted badly enough to cost them their placements, that was on him. He was the one who had led them here.

He got up again, jaw tight, and reactivated his evasion skill.

Kira had been watching his face. She read it accurately. "Brother Don," she said, her voice steady, "it’s just a job. I have savings. If all three of us end up cut from the studio over our levels, we can start our own."

Lily nodded along. "Exactly. Don’t worry about it. Worst case, I just move in with you permanently."

Don waved a hand at her. "I was hoping you’d get hired so you’d stop eating my food. You cannot fail. That’s final."

The Bone General had other ideas. It turned from Don without warning and launched itself at Lily with sudden, focused violence. Lily’s evasion skill fired immediately, but the boss pushed through Kira’s shield stun and kept coming. There was no clean answer to it.

Over the next five minutes, the resurrection light flickered through the depths of the Anya Mine like a broken lantern. Bernita, who had held out the longest, died twice. Don died five times. The others fell somewhere in between. When Don glanced at the level leaderboard, his ranking had dropped out of the top ten thousand.

He looked around at the group. They looked back at him, not with accusation, not with bitterness, but with the patient, understanding eyes of people trying to make him feel better about something that was entirely his fault. The expression was familiar. It was the same look his colleagues had worn the day he handed in his resignation.

Starlight gathered in the corners of his eyes before he could stop it.

Diana’s message arrived sharp and immediate. "If you cry, I will never speak to you again. Pull yourself together. You’re embarrassing."

He typed back, his throat tight. "Sister. I’m sorry."

Her reply came after a brief pause. "Silly child. Look at the berserk timer. Less than ten seconds. Victory is right in front of you."

He looked. She was right.

The dungeon floor was empty now, everyone had scattered to the edges, leaving the center to the Bone General alone. The boss had fixed its attention on Don with the single-minded obsession of something that had made him its personal mission. Don circled it in slow, careful arcs, maintaining the wave-pattern footwork, keeping just beyond reach. In some distant, analytical part of his mind, he noted that moments like this one, teetering on the edge of complete failure, had genuinely sharpened him. Fear had a way of doing that, when there was nothing left to lose.

The halberd came again. Don watched it come, waited until the last possible instant, and let his arms carry the motion through.

"Evasion skill."

A clean white MISS floated above his head.

The White Bone General let out a long, mournful series of howls. The skeletal tiger beneath it simply fell apart, bones scattering across the mine floor in a dry clatter. The General stood alone, diminished and weakened, its berserk state burned out and gone.

Attack power: 900–1400. Physical defense: 1000. Magic defense: 850.

The price of going too hard, too long.

Yates charged in before the dust settled, his sweeping attack vicious with accumulated grievance. "You’re exhausted now, you bastard!"

Diana appeared at his shoulder and swatted him. "Language. Children do not swear."

"Everyone!" Don shouted. "We have less than five minutes. Move!"

What followed was nothing like the previous hour. Everything the group had been holding in reserve came out at once, ultimates, finishers, every last aggressive skill in every hotbar. Even Bernita threw herself into the melee. The Bone General, stripped of its advantages, had no answer for any of it. The mine echoed with the sound of it, and nobody felt the midnight hour at all.

When the Bone General’s health bar reached the final sliver, the group stopped as one.

Don turned to Diana, and his tone left no room for debate. "Sister Diana. You take the kill."

She blinked. Then she reached out and wrapped her hand around his, guiding the gleaming Huron dagger across the White Bone General’s body in one smooth motion.

The boss collapsed.

The room went quiet for a moment. Then Diana turned on Don with the expression of someone who had been waiting to say something for some time.

"You dropped five levels and you were still playing the hero?" She shoved him sideways without ceremony. "Go find the poem manuscript. We have a quest to turn in."

"Right." Don shook himself and looked around. "Why haven’t our levels come back yet?"