The hammer attacked him swiftly and with full force, its blow coming with unwavering intent.

Cold air cracked sharply around it, carrying a chilling sense of menace. The strike emerged from an unexpected angle he hadn’t anticipated—fast, decisive, and nearly reaching him before his body responded to what his eyes hadn’t initially perceived.

Then...

***

Ten days into the intensive training period, the late afternoon sun cast a warm, golden glow through the dusty air. Dust particles shimmered in the slanted light, kicked up by the rhythmic scuffing of boots on the packed earth. Florence crouched low in front of Wobbly, her eyes sharp and intense as she carefully examined his stance and movements, giving the same focused attention she reserved for every combat drill.

Wobbly looked back at her.

"Your summoning," Florence said. "It bounces, yes?"

"It bounces and wobbles," Dominic said.

"So it can absorb impact and redirect it." She tilted her head. "That’s its physical property." She looked up at him. "Have you tried using your summoning’s traits directly? I feel like it should have the same principle as Theresa’s amplification. Just a different source."

He looked at Wobbly. Wobbly looked at him.

They tested it repeatedly. Four attempts in total yielded no results, each ending in failure. Frustration grew, and they nearly abandoned the experiment altogether. However, on the fifth try, something changed, a subtle, almost imperceptible shift. It wasn’t a dramatic transformation, but a sudden, strange presence that hadn’t been there before. His body seemed to alter in texture beneath Florence’s firm grip, becoming both malleable and resistant simultaneously, a unique property of something that absorbed force rather than breaking.

Without warning, Florence forcefully threw him against the wall behind her. The impact was sharp, and he bounced off, recoiling from the collision. Both of them paused abruptly, becoming completely motionless. A small puff of dust and debris drifted down from the point of impact, settling silently.

Florence straightened, already calculating the implications. As a seasoned general, she did what she did best, responding swiftly and strategically whenever a new variable entered her campaign, ready to adapt to whatever this strange phenomenon might mean.

"We’re adding this," she said.

***

The hammer connected with a thunderous impact, the full force of an SS+ rank’s weapon unleashing upon an unprotected body at full extension. In that final fraction of a second, the Wobbly trait activated unexpectedly. His body became malleable at the point of impact, warping slightly under the force. Instead of concentrating the energy into specific points that would have ended the fight instantly, the force rippled outward across his surface, dispersing some of the blow’s power and preventing immediate destruction.

Despite the mitigation, the hammer still struck true. The shockwave sent him bouncing backward, skidding across the rough stone surface with a screech of displaced debris. The cost was clear—his body absorbed the blow’s full brunt.

He finally slid to a halt, collapsing onto his side. Lying there for a moment, he took stock of his condition, feeling the residual ache and the lingering throb of the impact.

Ribs. Shoulder from the earlier fight, now adding to the new damage with a dull, persistent ache and swollen bruising. The specific assessment by someone who had spent the past month learning to distinguish between pain that signals the need to stop and pain that can be managed allowed him to push through.

He got up, albeit slower than he would have preferred, feeling each movement strain the injury. But he got up.

Florence was already moving toward him, her pace quick but controlled. One eye was steadily focused on her own target, which she had managed to herd into a narrow spot during a brief two-second window while also keeping track of the Dominic situation. Her attention was divided but efficient, demonstrating the skill of a seasoned fighter used to multitasking across multiple fronts, understanding that divided focus was an essential survival trait.

"Still alive?" The professional assessment sat right under the casual delivery.

"Yep. Still alive," he confirmed.

She looked at him for a moment, watching him catch his breath.

"Good. Get back in."

He got back in.

***

Florence pushed her effort to forty percent intensity.

The left boss recognized the critical difference between a twenty and a forty in the brief span it took Florence to cover the distance from her previous position to her designated target area. Her halberd sliced through the air with the decisive, efficient motion of an athlete who had been holding back for calibration and had now completed it.

Within seconds, she was slicing the enemy into rows of fist-sized cubes, each movement precise and calculated.

Dominic delivered the final, lethal blow to the right boss, his strike clean and swift.

Theresa’s amplification sat behind this action. Bond Step 2 was active and engaged deeply, more intense than during their courtyard practice sessions. Its warmth and unwavering steadiness radiated a calm confidence, as if fully attuned to the needs of this critical moment. The sword landed exactly where Florence had instructed him to aim. The follow-through was flawless, clean, and deliberate.

The right boss collapsed immediately.

Both phase one bodies dissolved into their respective energies, and their cores dropped onto the polished, dark floor with a soft thud, leaving a faint shimmer in the low ambient light.

The room fell completely silent, the only sound remaining was their breath steadying in the stillness.

Florence shifted her shoulder, muscles tense, then carefully inspected her halberd, running her fingers along its length to check for any subtle damage. She allowed herself a small nod of approval, acknowledging the general’s silent recognition of a completed objective.

Theresa lowered her hands slowly, the continuous flow of mana output briefly stabilizing.

Dominic stood over the dissolving cores, his stance tense. His ribs ached sharply, a persistent reminder of the damage inflicted, damage that had been managed, but not fully healed, as he watched the remnants fade away.

A few seconds after the battle concluded, the two dissolving bodies and their glowing cores began to shift. They shifted toward the center of the open space, being dragged by an unseen force with no apparent source.

Their cores shimmered with an intense glow, cracking open to release dark, shimmering affinity that spiraled upward in a twisting column into a singular point in the darkness above.

The air grew noticeably thicker suddenly, feeling unnervingly wrong, like the sensation of air hardening as something massive and ominous was coalescing into a tangible form.

"Step back!" Theresa said loudly to Dominic and Florence.

***

It descended from the darkness with an eerie grace.

Six membranous wings, veined with faintly luminescent lines that glowed a sickly violet along every channel, fluttered softly. Each wing was studded with circular spots that pulsed like open sores at irregular intervals, giving a disturbing rhythm to its movements.

The wingspan stretched dramatically, and beneath the wings, the body was humanoid in shape but unnervingly tall and slender, with skin stretched taut over bones that appeared to have an unusual number of joints, at least in several places. The skin resembled the color and texture of old, bleached bone, cracked and weathered. It bore no armor or anything that hinted at protection, nor any indication that it had ever needed such defenses, hinting at an intrinsic resilience or otherworldly origin.

Where its face should have been, a perfectly circular opening. Rimmed with jagged teeth that didn’t fit together, edges mismatched and crowded, pointing in directions that served no mechanical purpose. From the opening, a thick dark substance wept continuously. Slow and viscous. It dripped onto the floor and sizzled against the stone with a sound like something being erased.

It was crying.

Soft hiccuping sobs vibrated in its chest at a frequency that had nothing to do with sound and everything to do with something older than hearing, an instinctual, primal distress. The sobs swelled repeatedly before escalating into a piercing shriek that shattered the tense air.

Deafening and raw, it was the sound of a being that despised its own existence, carrying the weight of eons of suffering.

The shriek bore down on their eardrums like a tangible force, pressing inward with brutal intensity. Dominic felt it reverberate through his teeth, a dull ache that spread through his jaw. Wobbly went completely still, trembling as if caught in an unseen grip.

He didn’t need a status window to understand the danger. The oppressive pressure in the air spoke volumes. SSS+++ rank, an almost unimaginable threat. Above them, the dungeon’s colorless sky loomed, a vast, grotesque spectacle of six membranous wings unfurled, each spanned like the tattered sails of a long-dead ship.

From somewhere within that darkness, a face with eyes that wept unceasingly stared down, its expression torn between sorrow and rage, endlessly mourning and enraged at the same time.

Theresa’s voice cut through the residual shriek. Loud and clear and already in motion.

"Florence. Go all out."