The moment Kai saw the crowd he stopped walking.

"Why are there so many people?"

Sera looked ahead and immediately groaned. "Oh no."

The entire street near the C-rank gate was packed. Hunters, streamers, reporters, and civilians with no reason to be here except curiosity.

All of them pressed against the barriers with phones raised.

The second someone noticed Kai and Sera the noise hit like a wall.

"It’s them!"

"Kai! Sera!"

"They’re doing another run!"

Kai stood very still for a moment while Sera put one hand over part of her face. "We might’ve become a little popular," she said.

"That feels like an understatement."

"Null guy!" someone shouted from somewhere in the crowd. "DO THE THING!"

Kai looked at Sera. "What thing?"

"No idea," she said.

"SHOW US THE PHASING AGAIN!"

Kai turned back to the crowd. "Phasing?"

Sera coughed. "Comments noticed the armor effect."

"Oh."

He felt the pressure again but this wasn’t from the dungeon or a deadline. The pressure wasn’t from the dungeon this time.

It was the attention.

The air around him shifted for half a second in a way that had nothing to do with wind.

[External Attention: Increasing.]

[Scaling Effect: Accelerating.]

He kept walking.

The crowd parted as they approached the C-ranked gate, not because anyone asked them to but because everyone wanted a better angle. Some people had gone completely silent and held their phones.

Like they were afraid talking might interrupt something important.

The gate crackled in front of them, blue electricity moving across the entrance.

[C-Rank Gate Detected.]

The dungeon title floated overhead.

[C-Rank Dungeon: Sunken River Tomb.]

[Recommended Level: 34.]

Water pressure rolled outward from the entrance in heavy waves. Sera wore new armor since the last run, lighter plating over her Valkyrie gear with the GaleWing insignia removed, and her blue hair caught the gate’s light as she stretched her shoulders and looked at him.

"Ready?"

Kai glanced back at the crowd one last time. Phones and shouting and someone chanting his name, which was genuinely one of the stranger things that had happened since the system went live.

He looked at the gate.

"Yeah," he said.

They stepped through together.

And then cold water hit his boots immediately.

The dungeon opened into massive flooded ruins stretching in every direction beneath a dark blue sky, broken stone paths cutting through rushing rivers, waterfalls crashing from cliffs that rose higher than any dungeon he had entered before.

Everything moved and echoed.

Even small movements sounded larger underwater.

The sound of water was constant and came from every direction at once. Then something exploded from the river beside them.

A fishman lunged out of the current holding a jagged coral spear, its scaled body moving with the fluid aggression of something that lived in this environment and had been doing so for a very long time. It wore no armor but it did not need to, the river around it responding to its movements like an extension of itself.

[River Fishman.]

[Level 34.]

Three more burst from the water behind it before Kai had finished reading the first one. They rushed forward together and before Kai could move one of them drove its weapon into the river floor and the water beneath him bent upward into a compressed pillar that exploded through the stone path.

Kai was already in the air when it detonated. Stone fragments sprayed in every direction and the shockwave hit his back and threw him forward. He twisted mid-flight and the Fractured Blade caught moonlight.

"They control the terrain!" Sera drove her blade through the nearest fishman and golden light erupted along the contact point, sending it spinning backward into the current. Another one twisted its hand and the water around Sera wrapped upward like living chains, tightening around her arms and legs and pulling her down toward the river.

Kai kicked off a broken pillar and launched himself toward the fishman controlling the water chains. The creature turned too slowly and the Fractured Blade arrived at its neck. The distortion cut clean through and the head flew into the air while the body collapsed into the current.

The water chains around Sera burst apart in golden light. Light spears erupted from the ground and pierced through the remaining fishmen, driving up through scaled bodies and lifting them off the stone paths. They released screeches but Kai and Sera did not stop attacking.

More fishmen burst from the river. Water pillars erupted from below with enough force to crack stone. Compressed currents launched like projectiles and shattered against the paths where Kai had been standing half a second before. Stone collapsed into the river when the fishmen struck it with their weapons.

Kai used the collapsing terrain as launch points, pushing off falling stone and riding the momentum through the air. The distortion found angles that existed inside the chaos. Kai moved like the collapsing battlefield had already made room for him.

A fishman raised its spear and water wrapped around the weapon in a spiraling current. Kai phased through the strike and drove his blade through the creature’s chest. The body hit the water and sank.

Sera covered the angles he left open without being told, instinctive at this point. He drew three fishmen toward a broken pillar; she dropped it on top of them.

By the time they reached the boss chamber both of them were soaked through and breathing harder than they had been at the start. The dungeon’s constant water pressure had built up in ways that dry dungeons did not. The chamber floor was ankle deep in water that reflected blue moonlight from somewhere above the ceiling.

At the center the surface broke apart and something rose.

Armored and enormous with a shark head and muscles that looked like carved steel, it held curved black blades in each hand while water spiraled around its body in controlled currents that it was clearly generating rather than simply using. It wore the water the way Sera wore her light armor.

[Fishmen Shark.]

[Level 38.]

"That thing knows martial arts," Sera said quietly.

The boss moved before she finished the sentence. It crossed the flooded chamber in under a second and the first strike hit Kai’s raised blade with weight that traveled up both arms and threw him backward through the water. His boots skidded across the submerged floor before he hit a broken pillar hard enough to crack it.

Pain detonated through his ribs and his vision blurred.

The Fishmen Shark had not used its full strength yet but the precision was worse than raw power because every ounce of force went exactly where it would do the most damage.

He was still processing the landing when the boss spun and drove a water-enhanced kick into Sera’s side. The sound of it carried across the chamber like a thunderclap.

Sera’s light armor cracked down the left side and she went through two stone pillars before stopping. The golden plating was damaged in a way that the Undead General had only managed after several minutes of fighting.

The boss looked between both of them. Then it came for Kai.

Its blades moved like flowing water with no wasted motion, each strike smoothly becoming the next strike, and the currents around its body redirected every attack Kai tried and fed the momentum back into the next offensive movement.

He phased through one blade using Spectral Shift and the boss paused for exactly half a second, the first time anything had visibly surprised it, and that half second was the only opening the fight had offered so far.

"Sera!"

Golden spears rained down from above. The boss blocked three and dodged two but the positioning forced it away from Kai’s side of the chamber and that was what he needed.

He activated the Flame Swordsman emulation and started compressing.

[Class Emulation: Flame Swordsman – Partial.]

The Fractured Blade’s edges shifted to compress heat before Kai moved through the chamber while it built, leaving Sera to distract it as he waited for the right moment.

The shark warrior drove a water shockwave at Sera that sent her skidding back across the flooded floor. Her cracked armor absorbed what it could but not all of it. She stayed on her feet but barely.

The shark warrior rotated toward him with its blades already rising.

He jumped upwards but the blades continued following him. Seeing it rushing towards him, Kai brace for impact.

But then as he unconscious push his feet in the air. It seemed to land on something hard for half a second. And then as if that thing was fading away, he instinctively kicked off it, and his body propel itself towards the Fishmen Shark.

Kai couldn’t even think as he swung once, a clean horizontal arc, and let it all go at once.

The arc hit the water first.

Steam exploded in a column that crossed the entire chamber and filled the air with scalding mist. The Fishmen Shark caught the full force across its chest and the impact was not the gradual damage of many strikes but structural damage from one perfect hit.

A single glowing line crossed the shark warrior’s armored chest, and for one second nothing happened at all. Then the currents it had been holding around itself simply stopped, dropping out of the air as ordinary water. The boss folded down into the flood without any of the grace it had fought with, gone before it hit the surface.

The chamber went quiet except for the hiss of steam and the sound of water settling.

[Distortion Applied.]

[Amplification Complete.]

[Drop Quality: Optimized.]

[Reward Scaling: Increased.]

[Optimal Partnership: Conditions Met.]

[Dungeon Cleared: Duo.]

[Emulation Duration: Ended.]

[Level Increased: 26 to 28.]

[+2 Stats]

Kai let his breathing settle.

Steam was still rising from the water around them. But Kai mind was in a state of shock at what just happened.

"Are you okay?" Sera was standing twenty feet away with her cracked armor giving off faint light from the damaged sections and her expression doing the thing it did after a fight that had been closer than expected.

"Yes," Kai nodded. "Let’s check the loot."

Then they looked at the drop which was larger than the General’s.

Various ores for weapon and armor were stacked in formations that caught the chamber’s remaining light. Sharkbone daggers, dense and slightly curved, still carrying a faint water property even separated from the boss.

A silver necklace with a flowing water effect visible inside the pendant. A black ring carved with wave patterns that shifted when he picked it up.

And at the center, an epic-grade cloak, dark blue and shimmering, the material moving like deep water even when nothing was disturbing it.

[Tideking Cloak - Grade: S- Class.]

[Allows the user to control any water around them, as a passive shield or a weapon. Where there is no water, the user can summon pillars of it from below. Increases water damage.]

Both of them looked at it.

"Okay wow," Sera said quietly.

"That’s pretty good."

"Pretty good?" Sera stared at him. "Kai, people kill each other over gear like this."

"But we aren’t weak or stupid." Kai said, making Sera pause before nodding. "It should be helpful to you, right?"

"While it isn’t light. It’s still better than a lot of Rare Gear." Sera muttered as she picked it up before blinking.

"What’s wrong?"

"The stats are insane... The cloak itself raises everything I have by a flat forty." Sera glanced at Kai. "How much does the Spectral Warden give?"

Kai opened his interface and glanced at the attributes.

[Attributes.]

[Strength: 40. (+60)]

[Vitality: 43. (+110)]

[Agility: 39. (+80)]

[Magic: 40. (+40)]

"It only increases vitality, agility, and magic. But the boost is sixty more for the main two and twenty more for magic."

"Then yeah, the true benefit of Epic Gear really is the pure stats boost." Then Sera put on the cloak, which shimmered around her neck, and said. "Let’s hurry up."

They split the drops and the dungeon started coming apart around them while they were still finishing. Water surged through the cracks in the walls. Stone paths gave way into the river below.

"Kai."

"Already moving."

The ruins collapsed behind them in sections, the water pressure that had been the dungeon’s constant companion now working against the structure that had been containing it. They came through the gate entrance together and the crowd outside saw them first.

The noise hit immediately.

Then it got louder when the gate shattered behind them.

Blue light erupted upward into the Mythal sky and faded completely, another gate gone from the count. Somewhere across Mythal thousands of people checked the board at the exact same moment.

But the crowds here did not react the way they reacted to a number dropping.

They reacted to Kai and Sera standing in front of them, soaked and breathing hard, and to the understanding that what they had just seen on the board was something these two had just done.

Some people were shouting.

Some were just staring.

Others looked at Kai the way people looked at natural disasters with excitement right before fear catches up. A section of the crowd near the barrier had gone completely silent, phones still raised but nobody talking.

He even saw some of them glancing at their phones which played videos of him clearing the undead general and then glancing back up at him in glee.

The air around Kai shifted again as the sounds of chains cracking rang out.

And for one brief second Kai wanted the crowd to keep looking at him. The thought disappeared immediately.

That disturbed him more than the chains did.

[External Attention: Rapidly Increasing.]

[True Fans Gained: 20.]

[Scaling Effect: Intensifying.]

Twenty at once.

That had never happened before.

Sera grabbed his sleeve. "Move before we get surrounded."

"Good idea," he said.

They walked and the crowd parted ahead of them without being asked.

His phone buzzed.

Not a notification. A direct message from an account he did not recognize. The username was a string of numbers with no profile image, the kind of account that existed to send one message and nothing else.

The message was four words.

We should talk soon.

No signature or follow-up. The account had been created six hours ago, which was roughly the time the Sunken River Tomb clear had posted to the board.

Kai stared at the text for several seconds. Then he looked at the typing field for a moment. Then he closed it without responding and put his phone in his pocket.

He did not know for certain who had sent it. But he knew patterns well enough to expect the sender would come to him eventually for this talk. The question was whether it was an invitation or a warning.

Both were information.

He kept walking.

Behind him, somewhere in the city, a GaleWing internal memo had been drafted three hours ago and distributed to two people. The subject line read: Footage acquisition — Undead General clear. The body of the memo asked whether the footage rights could be purchased through the uploader before broader licensing occurred, and who the unnamed second player in the footage was, and whether anyone had made contact.

The memo had been written by Victor’s assistant.

The assistant had not signed it.

Because inside GaleWing people had already started arguing about whether Kai should be recruited.

Or contained.

Nobody inside GaleWing agreed which option was safer.