Dante ascended the final heavy iron staircase.

The air rapidly grew dry and metallic. It carried the distinct coppery scent of dried blood.

Before stepping through the massive stone archway into the fifth floor, he stopped.

The Abyss difficulty was unpredictable. He wanted to know exactly where his numerical baseline sat before he engaged what was supposedly the final boss of the Spire.

He opened his system interface.

[Participant: Dan]

[Level: 45]

[Class: Warrior]

[HP: 9,130 / 9,130]

[Stamina: 1,200 / 1,200 (Infinite Regen Active)]

[Core Attributes]

[Strength: 3,270]

[Agility: 1,140]

[Physical Defense: 2,850]

[Magical Defense: 1,600]

[Hidden Stats: Luck (100), Intuition (100), Charisma (100)]

His stats were completely absurd for a player who had logged into the server less than twenty-four hours ago.

The Annihilation-Tier dragon kill had forcibly shoved his level to 45. The stat crystals he had been popping after each floor boss had padded his baseline considerably.

"I have the health pool of a main tank and the damage of a glass cannon," Dante muttered and swiped the interface away. "Let us finish this."

He stepped through the stone archway.

The environment was a massive circular gladiator pit. The floor was covered in coarse blood-stained sand.

Towering fifty-foot-tall stone walls completely enclosed the arena. They were lined with empty dark archways.

Despite there being no visible audience, a low ambient audio track of a roaring bloodthirsty crowd echoed constantly through the colosseum.

[Spire of Ascension: Abyss Difficulty]

[Floor 5: The Apex Arena]

[Floor Modifier Active: Bloodlust]

[Warning: All healing received is reduced by 80%. All entities receive a 20% boost to movement speed.]

Dante barely had time to read the prompt before the heavy iron portcullis on the far side of the arena violently slammed open.

A massive beast launched itself out of the darkness and landed in the center of the sand with a heavy thud.

It was a Manticore, but heavily weaponized by the Abyss tier.

Its muscular lion-like body was plated in thick dark crimson iron.

Its wings were ragged leather and steel bone. Its long segmented tail ended in a jagged dripping stinger the size of a longsword.

[Floor Boss Spawn: Blood-Iron Manticore]

[Tier: Gold]

[Level: 20]

[HP: 45,000 / 45,000]

The beast didn’t roar. It didn’t posture or try to intimidate him.

Its dark red eyes locked onto Dante. The iron plating across its back flared with a harsh neon-red light.

[Boss Mechanic Triggered: Predatory Overdrive.]

The Manticore vanished.

It didn’t use a teleport skill. It simply moved with a base speed that completely broke the visual tracking parameters of the game.

The 100 points of Intuition of Dante flared like a siren. It warned him a fraction of a millisecond before the impact.

Dante threw himself backward.

The massive iron stinger ripped through the empty space where his neck had been.

It sparked violently against the gold plating of the [Sun-Forged Cuirass] as it grazed his shoulder.

[-1,800 HP!]

Dante hit the sand and rolled to instantly come up onto his feet.

He was bleeding. The sheer kinetic friction of the graze had completely bypassed his baseline mitigation.

Aura pulsed next to his ear and instantly cast [Resurgence Wave].

Because of the 80% healing reduction modifier of the arena, the massive 4,565 HP heal was brutally choked down to a mere 913 points.

His health bar barely recovered half of what the Manticore had just taken in a single graze.

"Okay, you are fast," Dante said. His eyes darted frantically across the arena.

He couldn’t visually track it.

The Blood-Iron Manticore was pacing the perimeter of the gladiator pit. It was running so fast it was leaving literal red afterimages in its wake.

Dante realized his current loadout was a massive liability in this specific room.

[Abyssal Cleave] dealt massive damage, but it had a distinct wind-up animation.

[Wrath of the Firebird] was an AoE, but it was heavily directional.

The Manticore was moving so fast it would easily sidestep the attacks and gut him during his recovery frames.

He needed to match its speed. He needed massive instantaneous burst damage.

He opened his infinite inventory and kept his eyes locked on the red blur circling him.

He dug into the pile of skillbooks he had purchased from the Outpost vendors and looted from the beginner forest.

He found a thin crackling blue tome.

[Item Appraised: Skillbook - Static Charge]

[Tier: Novice]

[Description: Coats the weapon of the user in weak electricity. Grants a 5% increase to attack speed for 10 seconds. Cooldown: 1 minute.]

Dante absorbed it instantly.

[Skill Learned: Static Charge (Novice)]

The red blur in the sand stopped abruptly.

The Manticore crouched low, and its iron wings flared out.

The red light bleeding from its armor concentrated entirely into its powerful hind legs. It was preparing its ultimate teleport-strike.

Dante didn’t brace for impact. He activated the new skill.

[Skill Executed: Static Charge.]

[Talent Activated: 10,000x Multiplier.]

[Registering 10,000 flawless executions.]

The combat enlightenment was electric.

The neural link of Dante was flooded with the absolute mastery of raw and uncontained voltage.

He didn’t just learn how to swing a sword faster.

He understood how to completely override the digital limiters of the muscular system of his avatar.

He felt the exact frequency required to turn his nervous system into a lightning storm. He forced his reaction time to mathematically exceed the engine of the game.

[Static Charge has reached Adept tier.]

[Static Charge has reached Master tier.]

[Static Charge has reached Grandmaster tier.]

Thick jagged bolts of blue lightning erupted from the gold armor of Dante.

The sand around his iron boots turned to glass from the sheer localized heat.

[Static Charge has reached Zenith tier.] 𝗳𝐫𝚎𝗲𝚠𝚎𝗯𝕟𝐨𝘃𝚎𝗹.𝗰𝗼𝗺

[Skill Evolution Triggered.]

[Static Charge has evolved into: Storm-Lord’s Avatar.]

The system interface turned a brilliant and blinding cyan.

[Storm-Lord’s Avatar (Zenith)]

[Description: The user channels the raw and unrestrained power of the storm. For 10 seconds, Attack Speed and Raw Damage are increased by 500%. Movement speed is uncapped. Cooldown: 5 minutes.]

The eyes of Dante turned solid and glowing blue. Sparks of electricity leaped from his iron gauntlets.

He held out his right hand.

The black brand flared. [Voidsever] materialized.

The primordial greatsword instantly devoured the ambient blue lightning.

It turned the crackling electricity around the massive blade into a volatile and pitch-black storm.

The Blood-Iron Manticore launched.

It triggered its teleport-strike.

The beast crossed the fifty yards of the arena in exactly one frame. It aimed its massive iron stinger directly for the center of the chest of Dante.

It was an attack designed to completely bypass human reaction time.

But Dante wasn’t reacting at human speed anymore.

Under the 500% speed steroid of [Storm-Lord’s Avatar], the teleport-strike of the Manticore didn’t look like an invisible blur.

It looked like it was moving through thick mud.

Dante didn’t try to dodge. He stepped directly into the path of the lethal strike.

[Skill Executed: Aegis Deflection]

The golden hexagonal shield flared into existence directly in front of his chest.

The iron stinger slammed into the perfect parry.

CLANG!

The concussive shockwave blew the blood-stained sand completely out of the arena. It exposed the bare stone floor beneath in a massive radius.

The 0.2-second parry window caught the ultimate attack of the Manticore flawlessly.

The massive kinetic energy of the beast was completely absorbed by the shield and violently reflected.

The 500% reflection damage hit the Manticore like a cannonball.

It staggered the massive boss backward. It completely broke its offensive momentum and left its iron-plated neck exposed.

Dante didn’t hesitate. His ten seconds of godhood were actively ticking down.

He gripped the dark bone hilt of Voidsever with both hands.

The 500% damage multiplier from [Storm-Lord’s Avatar] stacked onto his massive base attack power.

The passive of Voidsever, [Absolute Severance], guaranteed that 100% of the Gold-tier iron armor of the Manticore would be completely ignored.

Dante swung the black lightning-coated greatsword in a brutal and perfect horizontal arc.

The blade sheared through the thick iron-plated neck of the Manticore without a single fraction of resistance.

The sound of the physical impact was completely drowned out by the thunderclap of the Zenith-tier lightning discharging from the blade.

The massive lion-like head of the Blood-Iron Manticore separated cleanly from its shoulders. It spun through the air and was completely decoupled from its body.

Above the severed neck, the damage numbers exploded in bright red static.

[-135,000! Critical Hit! OVERKILL!]

The headless body of the Manticore stood frozen for a single second before violently exploding into a massive shower of golden polygons and blue light.

Dante stood in the center of the glassed sand and slowly lowered Voidsever.

The blue lightning violently arcing across his gold armor flickered and died as the ten-second duration of [Storm-Lord’s Avatar] expired.

He let out a long and heavy exhale.

The sheer adrenaline of processing visual and combat information at that speed left him momentarily dizzy.

Aura chimed happily and floated down from the air to affectionately nuzzle his cheek.

The system flooded his vision with victory prompts and caught up to the sudden execution.

[Target Eliminated: Blood-Iron Manticore (Level 20 Gold)]

[Experience Gained.]

[Floor 5 Cleared.]

[Time: 0 Minutes, 45 Seconds.]

[Reward Distributed: +10 to all base stats.]

Dante dismissed Voidsever back into the brand on his wrist.

He rolled his shoulders and felt the immediate surge of power from the flat stat boosts.

He walked over to the center of the arena where the Manticore had died.

He vacuumed up a massive pile of gold coins, high-tier crafting materials, and a single glowing Gold-tier chest piece that he threw into his infinite inventory to appraise later.

He looked around the empty gladiator pit.

The ambient audio of the cheering phantom crowd had completely stopped. The arena was dead silent.

"Alright, we are done here," Dante said and stretched his neck. "System. Open the exit portal. I want to hit the main server."

He waited for the familiar swirling blue portal to appear in the center of the room.

It was the standard server-wide reward for clearing the final trial of the Outpost.

It was his ticket out of the beginner limitations and into the open economy where he could secure his real-world physical safety.

Nothing happened.

The blue portal didn’t appear.

Dante frowned and looked around the empty sand. "System. Acknowledge Floor 5 clear. Initiate exit protocols."

The silence in the arena deepened.

The temperature which had been warm from the lightning and the sand suddenly plummeted and turned entirely freezing.

A loud and jarring alarm violently shrieked in his ears! It wasn’t the standard red alert.

The tone was discordant, heavily corrupted, and deeply unsettling.

The sky above the open colosseum didn’t just turn dark. It shattered.

The system interface slammed into his vision.

The text wasn’t blue, gold, or even the red of a Catastrophic event.

The text was a deep bruised and pulsating black.

[ERROR.]

[ERROR.]

[Anomaly Detected in Participant: Dan.]

[Abyss Difficulty Parameters Breached.]

The blood of Dante ran completely cold.

[Spire of Ascension - True Final Floor: The Primordial Hunger]

[Warning: You have entered the domain of the Gluttony.]

The solid stone walls of the gladiator pit violently dissolved into thick black smoke. The blood-stained sand vanished beneath his boots.

Dante was falling again. He was plunged back into an absolute and eerie void.

"You have got to be kidding me," Dante whispered into the dark.