"1905!"

The air seemed to pause for a fraction of a second. Before anyone could fully process what they had just seen, Vera was already moving. She crossed the distance between herself and the Scythe Demon like something launched rather than something running, her footfalls barely audible against the ground.

By the time she arrived, the crossbow was already gone from her hands and resting against her hip, and her longsword was drawn and in motion. The blade caught the light as it swung, tracing a cold, precise arc straight toward the Scythe Demon’s neck.

"Ding-dong!" The system notification arrived with its familiar chime. "Player Extraordinary used the Vital Strike skill on Scythe Demon. Scythe Demon lost 4029 health points and will continue to lose 895 health points per second for 8 seconds."

Vital Strike was a War Spirit exclusive. Its mechanics were deceptively simple and brutally punishing. Land it on a non-vital area and the attack bonus was cut in half. Land it cleanly on a vital point and the bonus swelled, the damage multiplied, and a devastating bleed effect was applied on top of everything else. It was the kind of skill that separated players who could afford the skill book from players who could actually use it. The book currently ran around 100 gold coins on the open market, sitting below Qiankun Strike at 200 gold coins, Head-on Slash at 300 gold coins, and the nearly mythical Smear Toxin, which almost never appeared in listings at all. Money alone did not make a player worthy of the skill. In the wrong hands, it was an expensive disappointment.

The Scythe Demon’s health bar began to slide downward in real time, the bleed ticking steadily against it. The creature snarled and swung its massive blade at Vera in retaliation, the movement heavy and telegraphed. Vera was not there when it arrived. She had already slipped sideways, her footwork light and maddening, circling to the demon’s back with a speed that made tracking her feel almost pointless. Her rapier moved next, the blade catching the light in short, sharp flashes as it carved three precise lines across the demon’s back at a speed that made the motion look effortless, tracing a perfect equilateral triangle into its hide.

"Wind Whirlwind Slash!"

"2785!"

The skill carried a secondary effect that made it particularly nasty against anything that relied on turning to face its target. The Scythe Demon’s ability to rotate was now crippled by thirty percent, its movements sluggish and stiff where they had been fluid before. For melee monsters and players alike, that kind of positional penalty was close to a death sentence when facing someone as mobile as Vera.

Dark Elf warriors operated differently from most classes. Their raw attack numbers were not exceptional, not the kind of figures that made a damage meter explode. What they brought instead was layered, relentless control, skill effects that stacked and compounded and made the fight increasingly impossible for the thing on the receiving end.

Don, by comparison, had no such elegance to offer. He crouched low, moving into position behind the Scythe Demon with what he privately considered to be a fairly dramatic and credible approach. He released the Killing Intent to sharpen his edge, set his weight, and drove his blade horizontally into what should have been a clean backstab. The Scythe Demon sidestepped. Not a dramatic dodge, just a small, economical shift of its body that put Don’s blade through empty air. It was almost worse than being blocked outright.

Vera’s laughter carried across the short distance between them. "Just focus on dealing damage, stop trying to look cool."

Don said nothing. His expression, had anyone been looking, was the picture of a man working very hard to maintain composure while quietly dying inside. He blinked back the imaginary tears, set his jaw, and committed to a pair of Consecutive Slashes instead, both strikes landing with solid, satisfying weight. Then he flicked his wrist in a way that managed to look almost casual, and three numbers rolled out in quick succession.

"1895!"

"2094!"

"Critical Hit 5206!"

The last number felt like vindication. Don was still riding the warm glow of it when the Scythe Demon pivoted without warning. There was a half-second of red light, the demon’s blade already completing its arc, and then the sound of the impact arrived before the pain did, a deep whooshing tear as the glowing edge opened a line across Don’s chest. The sensation made his grip on his weapon go dangerously loose for a moment, his hands buzzing with the force of it. The number above his head was not small.

"3485!"

Don stared at it. His stomach dropped somewhere below the ground.

Qiankun Strike.

He did not stop to appreciate the symmetry of having just been on the receiving end of a skill that cost 200 gold coins on the open market. He activated his Evasion Skill and put distance between himself and the demon in the same motion, his body already responding before his thoughts had fully caught up. Almost simultaneously, Little Chili and Kira moved in from either side, their skills discharging in near-perfect unison, a coordinated burst of force that hammered into the Scythe Demon from two directions at once.

The Scythe Demon answered with a wide, sweeping strike, its blade completing a full 180-degree arc that caught Kira, Little Chili, and Vera all at the same time.

"1195!"

"1958!"

"1485!"

Vera’s gear was good, genuinely good, but her War Spirit class carried a Constitution tier of only 7, which kept her health ceiling at roughly 6000 points. The 1485 damage from that single sweep carved away a significant portion of what she had left to work with, and it became quickly apparent that the tanking role was no longer viable for her. Kira moved forward without being asked, absorbing the demon’s attention onto herself. She was built sturdier, better suited to holding position under sustained pressure.

The moment Vera stepped back from the front line, she fixed Don with a stare that carried the full weight of a warning. "Don’t laugh, or I’ll make you a bean!"

Don kept his expression carefully neutral. "I haven’t even laughed yet."

"Come on, I’m looking at you with a smile on your face..."

He opened his mouth, found he had nothing particularly useful to say in his defense, and closed it again. Vera had been unreasonable in ways large and small for longer than he cared to count. Some things were simply not worth the energy of disputing.

Quinn had not been standing idle through any of this. Between her buff rotations, she had been talking Don through what she understood of the Dancer class, explaining its mechanics with the kind of enthusiasm that suggested she had been waiting for an audience. The Dancer, she explained, was not a class that only served allies. The dances it carried were split between two kinds of targets, the ones that healed and fortified comrades, and the ones that were specifically designed to destroy enemies.

As if to demonstrate, she tossed her staff lightly into the air, caught it, and let her body begin to move. Her skirt fanned outward as she turned, and the movement of the dance itself seemed to reach out toward the Scythe Demon, a layer of shimmering, heat-distorted light coiling around the creature’s body like living fire. The demon’s form shifted, its solid shape dissolving at the edges and reforming as something burning and elemental, a fire spirit wearing the creature’s outline.

"Ding-dong!" System notification: "Player Under the Hibiscus used the [Flame Dance] skill on Scythe Demon. Scythe Demon transformed into a fire spirit and temporarily forgot all of its skills. The effect lasts for 6 seconds."

The Scythe Demon, now stripped of everything except its most basic attack capability, thrashed uselessly. Every complicated ability it had possessed was gone, locked away behind the transformation, leaving it capable of nothing more threatening than a straightforward swing. The pressure on Kira dropped measurably.

Quinn, having finished the cast, revealed a smile that involved entirely too many teeth for comfort. Both rows were small and sharp, and the expression they formed was the specific smile of someone who found other people’s suffering genuinely amusing. It sent a chill moving through Don that had nothing to do with the game environment.

She did not use the second dance until its cooldown had nearly expired. In the intervening time, she worked steadily through her damage rotation, layering Fire Spell and Poison Curse over the demon in alternating waves. Neither skill was particularly impressive on its own; the numbers they produced were serviceable rather than devastating. The reason for this was visible in her stat build. Her health sat at a considerable 6000 points, which was a clear indicator of heavy Constitution investment. She had chosen survivability over damage output, a tradeoff that made her a reliable presence in a fight rather than a fragile one.

They ground the Scythe Demon down over the course of a little more than a minute, trading damage back and forth, the creature’s health bar shrinking in fits and starts until it finally gave out entirely. The loot notification arrived. Six gold coins, gone. But tucked inside the drop table was something more valuable: a single piece of dark ore, its surface curling with faint threads of black smoke that drifted upward and dissolved into the air, silent and strange.