Malgrath charged.
Not like before. Without the slowness of something that hasn't needed to hurry for centuries — this time with the full weight of something that had finally decided the enemy in front of it was worth taking seriously.
Gareth saw it coming and smiled.
'There it is.'
Eternal Ruin came straight down — Gareth threw himself right and the impact against the wall fragment where he'd been standing pulverized it in two. Stone in every direction. The edge of the broken roof groaned under his feet and Gareth adjusted his balance without thinking, repositioning on what was left.
Malgrath levitated.
Not dramatically. He simply rose from the floor with that specific logic of something that doesn't need rules to move, and Eternal Ruin filled with shadow until the blade disappeared completely inside that dense darkness.
And then the entire temple responded.
The column fragments that had fallen during the fight rose from the floor. The statue pieces from the path. The remains of the Executor's armor turned to ordinary stone. Everything — every object heavy enough to kill — floating in the air around Malgrath in silent orbit.
Gareth counted them on instinct.
'Seventeen. Twenty. Twenty-four.'
'Final phase. In the game this phase triggered when Malgrath lost enough health to enter desperation mode. I never reached this point with just basic buffs.'
'I always used area buffs to clear the projectiles.'
'God, I miss them.'
[SYSTEM ALERT]
[Runner's Speed: buff expiring.]
[Speed reduced to 4% — critical duration.]
'Running out.'
It didn't matter. What mattered was the pattern.
Because Malgrath had one. He always had one — every boss had one, no matter how many objects they threw or how long the phase lasted. And Gareth had spent twenty-seven runs learning patterns.
Malgrath extended Eternal Ruin forward.
Every fragment launched at once.
Gareth ran.
Not toward Malgrath — sideways, changing direction every half second, using the broken roof fragments as improvised cover. A column grazed his shoulder and tore a chunk out of the wall behind him. A statue fragment cut through the air centimeters from his head.
He dodged one fragment left. Another right. Let the third pass overhead by dropping at the last instant.
'Large objects first. Then medium ones in waves of three. Then the small ones all at once.'
'And in the moment between the second and third wave — exactly half a second where Malgrath reloads — there's a window.'
Gareth waited for it.
First wave — the large fragments, one by one, slow but devastating. He dodged every one.
Second wave — three medium ones simultaneously from different angles. He threw himself to the ground, let all three pass over him, came up moving.
Half a second.
He sprinted straight at Malgrath.
The air between them was thick with the small fragments still in orbit — twenty objects spinning in tight circles around the boss. Gareth entered that orbit without slowing down, feeling the weight of the air shift around him, dodging on instinct and extreme perception, every micro-movement calculated in the space between one object and the next.
He reached Malgrath's chest.
The neck joint.
He drove both blades in simultaneously with his full body weight and every remaining active buff behind them.
Eternal Ruin fell.
Not to the floor — it disintegrated into pure shadow before it got there, the darkness dissolving into the night air as if it had never existed.
The orbiting fragments all fell at once.
Malgrath didn't fall. He came apart. The armor separated piece by piece, each plate dissolving into the same shadow as Eternal Ruin, until all that remained was the crown — fused, ancient, with no skull left to rest on — which hit the floor with a sound that resonated through the entire temple like the end of something that had lasted far too long.
Complete silence.
Gareth stood on the broken roof, the Claws of Marveth in his hands, the sky of Eldralid open above his head.
He breathed.
'I did it.'
Not with emotion. Just as a fact. The confirmation of something he had known from the moment he closed his eyes and let Valdris hit him.
He checked the timer.
[00:00:01]
One second.
He stared at it.
"Cutting it close." He murmured. A smile appeared on its own. "I always did like the drama."
[FLOOR 1 CLEARED]
[Boss defeated: Malgrath, the Ruined King]
[Solo clear. No casualties. Time recorded.]
[Completion rank: LEGENDARY]
[This floor has not been cleared in recorded history.]
[Time of completion: 04:58:59]
[Humanity has been preserved.]
He read it once.
Then again.
'Legendary.'
[LEVEL UP]
[Level 1 → Level 15]
[Boss bonus: First Floor Legendary Clear — Solo]
[Stats Updated]
[Strength: 12 → 47]
[Agility: 15 → 52]
[Endurance: 10 → 38]
[Perception: 18 → 61]
[Dexterity: 8 → 48]
[Vitality: 10 → 38]
[Buff Master bonus applied: all stats +15%]
'Level 15. Off a floor one boss.'
'In the game, players reached level 8 clearing this same floor in groups of six. And as always, I did it alone.'
'The difference is exactly what I expected.'
[The Tower acknowledges an exceptional feat.]
[A solo challenger has defeated the First Floor Boss with one second remaining.]
[This achievement will be recorded.]
[Enter the name of the hero and challenger who emerged victorious, so that their deeds may be known across Eryndal.]
[ ________________ ]
He stared at the blank field.
He didn't think too hard about it.
He typed.
[MOURGARE]
He pressed confirm.
***
The sky above Eldralid exploded.
Not with the green of the countdown that had terrorized the city for five hours — with something different. A white light that burst from the top of the Endless Tower and expanded in every direction at the speed of something that doesn't need permission to reach everywhere at once.
And in the center of that light, carved into the sky as if it had always been there waiting for the right moment:
[MOURGARE HAS DEFEATED THE FLOOR 1 BOSS]
[HUMANITY WILL LIVE TO TELL OF THIS ACT]
One name. Just a name. In letters readable from every corner of the city.
All of Eldralid saw it.
In the main plaza, where half the city had spent hours pressed against walls watching the countdown with the resignation of people who had already made peace with the inevitable, the silence that followed the light lasted exactly two seconds.
Then everything erupted at once.
"He did it! Someone actually did it!"
"We're alive! We're still alive!"
A woman bent forward with her hands on her knees, crying without making any effort to hide it. An older man raised both arms toward the sky with an expression that had no exact name. Two strangers embraced in the middle of the street without quite knowing why.
"Mourgare? Who is Mourgare?"
"I don't know. Doesn't matter. He did it."
"Whoever you are — thank you! Thank you!"
The shouts multiplied toward the sky as if Mourgare could hear them from wherever he was. As if the words could reach the name still burning above their heads.
"Thank you, Mourgare!"
"Thank you!"
The name blazed for thirty seconds above a city screaming its gratitude toward someone with no face, no history, and no apparent reason to have done what he'd done.
***
In the main corridor of the academy, Victor Thornfield stopped.
He had been standing in that same hallway for five hours, motionless, wearing the expression of someone who knows there is nothing he can do and hasn't finished accepting it. The most powerful man in Eryndal. Leader of the Eternal Blades. Rank S+.
Useless.
He looked up when the light filled the windows.
He read the name.
Silence.
His knuckles turned white around nothing — there was nothing in his hands but he closed them anyway, as if he needed to grip something to keep from saying what he was thinking.
"Mourgare?"
He didn't know the name. It wasn't one he'd heard in any ranking, any report, any conversation among high-rank Hunters. It wasn't anyone who existed in any record he had ever seen.
And yet this person had done what he couldn't.
"Who the hell is that?!"
The question arrived alongside something Victor Thornfield didn't experience often — something he recognized with a specific discomfort.
It wasn't admiration.
It was rage.
Three hallways away, Roxanne Thornfield looked up at the sky through the nearest window.
She read the name.
Her brow furrowed slightly — the only outward sign that something had caught her off guard.
"Mourgare...?"
Not in any ranking she knew. Not a name that had crossed any conversation at the academy, among the Eternal Blades, anywhere people talked about real power. Nobody.
"Cleared the first floor alone...?"
"With one second left...?"
She turned it over internally with the same calm she applied to any new variable — no urgency, no visible emotion. But the question didn't go away.
It stayed there, taking up space in a mind that wasn't used to leaving questions unanswered.
"Never heard of him." She said it quietly, to no one. A pause. "Who could it be?"
***
Gareth watched it all from the broken roof of the temple.
The letters in the sky. The lights coming on in the city's windows. The shouting rising from the plaza — he couldn't make out the words from here, but he didn't need to. The tone said everything.
His name. In the sky of a world he hadn't known existed a week ago. An entire city screaming it upward as if he could hear them.
Something in his chest that had no exact name expanded until it didn't fit right and he had to exhale to make room for it.
"Incredible." He said it quietly. To no one. Just because the thought was too big to keep inside. "Absolutely incredible."
He stayed like that for several seconds — standing among the rubble of a throne room he'd helped destroy, watching his own name fade from the night sky while a city that didn't know him thanked him from below.
"What an legendary way to begin."
He smiled.
"That was quite entertaining."
The voice came from his left.
Gareth turned his head.
The raven was perched on a wall fragment two meters away, its green eyes reflecting the last of the light still lingering in the sky. It was watching him with that specific expression of something that has observed everything from the beginning and is deciding what to make of what it saw.
"You're still here." Gareth looked at it. "I thought you'd left."
"Almost." The raven tilted its head. "But I stayed to watch."
"And?"
"And I find you very interesting." A pause. "I haven't seen anything like this in a long time. Possibly ever."
Gareth considered that.
"What will you do now?"
"Observe." Simple. Direct. "I want to see what you become. A very close spectator, let's say."
Gareth looked at it for a moment.
"You can travel with me if you want." He said it like it was the most natural thing in the world. "It'll be entertaining. Consider it payment for the help."
The raven didn't answer immediately.
Then, with the slowness of something that had already made the decision before the conversation started but preferred not to show it:
It rose from the wall fragment and landed on Gareth's shoulder.
Gareth felt the weight. Light. Real.
He looked at the sky where his name had been thirty seconds ago.
He looked at the forty-nine floors floating above Eldralid, waiting for someone to dare climb them.
He looked at the city that had no idea who he was.
"Perfect." He said it with a calm that had nothing to do with stillness — it was the specific calm of someone who has just arrived exactly where they wanted to be. "Now get ready."
The raven said nothing.
"Because this is going to get interesting." A pause. "We'll take it slow. No rush. No countdowns." Another pause. "Let's enjoy this new beginning."
The wind moved through the ruins of the temple.
Somewhere in Eldralid, someone was still shouting Mourgare's name toward the sky.
Gareth closed his eyes for a moment.
Opened them.
And smiled.