The boss finally fell.

For a breath, nobody moved.

The six-armed corpse lay beneath Neo, heavy and obscene even in death, black blood running out across the stone around the throne. The severed head had rolled several steps away and rested near the broken stairs with that same furious expression frozen on it, as if the thing had died without agreeing to it.

Then the notification appeared.

[Soul-Window]

[You have slain Mourning Executioner - Heart Core.]

Neo’s mouth curved faintly.

"Yeah," he muttered under his breath. "Die properly this time."

A Soul Core surfaced from the corpse, larger than the others, its light denser, deeper, pulsing with enough weight to make greed crawl straight up his spine. Two swords had also remained instead of fading, one fallen near the body, the other farther off where the last exchange had thrown it. Both still carried the same ugly pressure they had held in life.

All around him, the surviving Awakeneds were on the floor or close to it, breathing like animals that had outrun slaughter by a finger’s width. Some were bleeding, others were staring.

Neo crouched.

He reached first for the Soul Core.

"Wait!"

The voice came loud enough to cut through the exhausted quiet. Neo turned his head slightly and found a blonde awakened glaring at him from several steps away, one hand still pressed to her side where the boss had nearly opened her.

"Don’t you think you’re being selfish?" she said. "Taking all of that for yourself after a fight like this?"

Neo stared at her.

The words made so little sense that, for a second, he almost thought the boss had hit her harder than it looked. He clicked his tongue and turned back toward the Soul Core without giving her anything more than that.

Before anyone else could join the stupidity, Byron’s voice tore across the hall.

"Are you all blind, or just shameless?"

That got their attention.

Byron pushed himself upright with visible effort, blood on his clothes, one hand still trembling from everything the fight had taken out of him. Even like that, there was enough force left in him to make the rest shut up.

"We’re alive because of Neo," Byron shouted. "He read the boss. He found the pattern. If we’re still breathing, it’s because that boy gave us the only opening we had. So yes, I think it’s perfectly fair for him to take the Soul Core and the Soul Relic."

Snot backed him immediately, voice rough from the fight.

"A lot of you stopped fighting the moment one of your friends died so you could steal their Soul Cores off the floor," he said. "You’ve got a lot of nerve talking about greed now."

Neo stopped listening after that.

He grabbed the Heart Core and consumed it.

The thing dissolved into him in a cold, heavy rush, and the window unfolded again.

[Soul-Window]

[You have consumed Mourning Executioner - Heart]

[+200 Souls]

[200/2500 Vein]

A second notification followed it almost at once.

[Soul-Window]

[You have obtained a new class. Do you wish to use it?]

[Berserk Swordsman - Saint

Abilities:

Frenzy: In a frenzied state, your senses dull, but Strength and Agility increase by 50%.

Relentless Pursuit - More mastery required.

Iron Hunger - More mastery required.]

Neo accepted it without the slightest hesitation.

[Secondary Class Updated.]

A sword class.

Saint rank.

His mouth almost curved on its own.

That was not a class he needed to think twice about. Not after the way the boss had forced them through steel, blood, and timing. Anything tied to a blade at that level was worth taking first and questioning later.

His attention shifted next toward the two swords.

The first reacted the instant his fingers closed around the hilt.

[Soul-Window]

[You have obtained Soul Relic: Twin Fangs of the Mourning Executioner]

[Saint]

[Description: A paired set of blades once carried by the six-armed guardian of the throne. Rottooth spreads a deep-acting poison with every clean cut. Bloodmourn tears wounds wider and intensifies blood loss. When both blades wound the same target in close succession, the target’s movement slows and their body begins to fail from within.]

Neo read it once.

Then again.

Inside his head, something close to hunger started salivating.

Saint.

Poison on one. A tearing effect on the other. A third effect when both entered the same target one after another. A paired relic dropped by a Heart Core boss. That was not merely good loot. That was obscene.

’You generous bastard.’

There was no gratitude in the thought. Only appetite.

He could already feel The Thousand-Form stirring inside him at the touch of the twin blades like a starving thing that had just caught the scent of fresh meat. The tower answered before he could do more than secure them.

The whole structure shook harder than before, stone groaning beneath their feet with enough force to make everyone lift their heads at once. Dust rained from above. Cracks widened across the walls around the throne.

And beyond the boss room, the Breach opened again.

A tear in space formed near the far side of the chamber, widening into the exit they had been denied for so long. For a heartbeat, nobody trusted it. Then one exhausted awakened staggered toward it, followed by another, and the rest of the room finally remembered they were alive.

"We move!" Byron shouted. "Anyone who can still stand, out!"

That broke the last of the paralysis.

People dragged themselves up, helped the wounded, and limped toward the opening with whatever strength they still had left. A few kept glancing back at the boss’s corpse as if half-expecting it to rise again. Neo didn’t blame them. Places like this rarely ended cleanly.

His attention found Marika.

She was kneeling beside Max’s body.

She had not screamed. Had not broken apart loudly either. That almost made it worse. One hand was under Max’s shoulder. The other rested against the ruined remains of his chest as if some part of her still had not accepted there was nothing left to save.

Snot reached her and stopped there.

"We have to go," he said quietly.

Marika nodded once.

That was all.

Snot bent, got an arm under Max, and helped lift the body with a care Neo had not expected from someone who usually hid half his good side under jokes and noise.

"We’ll bury him properly," Snot said.

This time Marika answered.

"Yeah."

The word came out scraped raw, but it came.

Far away from them, in the hidden chamber where Leo Duplain had been waiting to profit from everyone else’s deaths, another Breach tore open without warning.

Leo stared at it.

"What?"

The tower beneath him was shaking now, the safe room no longer offering anything close to safety, and the new opening in front of him told a story he had already started rejecting before the thought fully formed.

"No... that’s impossible."

One of the others stepped back. "Leo?"

He rounded on them with fury all over his face.

"They beat it," he snapped. "They beat the boss. How? There wasn’t anyone down there in Heart Core. It should have been impossible."

The tower groaned again, harder this time.

Stone dust fell from above. The floor shifted just enough to make all of them understand the same thing.

Whatever Leo had planned no longer mattered if he died trapped inside the ruin that had just betrayed him.

"Move!" he snarled. "We leave. Now."

Back on the boss floor, Neo took one last look at the corpse of the Mourning Executioner, at the blood drowning the throne steps, at the place where Max had fallen, and turned toward the Breach with the twin relics in hand and far more greed in his chest than was healthy for any sixteen-year-old.

But one thought stood above all the others.

Leo.

That bastard was still alive.

Neo stepped toward the opening with that thought wedged so deep inside him it almost felt like another blade.

Leo Duplain had better not be standing there when they returned to the real world.

Because if Neo saw him right away, he did not know whether he would be able to stop himself.