The floor dropped out from under Dante.

He didn’t fall through a physical trapdoor. The solid stone of the gladiator pit simply ceased to exist and was replaced by a digital vacuum.

The gravity flipped, twisted, and then completely vanished.

Dante drifted in absolute and suffocating darkness. There was no wind. There was no sound.

The system had hijacked his exit. He had cleared the fifth floor. He had killed the Blood-Iron Manticore in under a minute.

The portal to the main server should have spawned.

Instead, the interface was glitching out in a bruised and pulsating black font.

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

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

"True Final Floor," Dante read the prompt and his voice was completely flat. "The system really hates it when you break its math."

He drifted downward for what felt like an eternity. Finally, his iron boots touched a surface.

It didn’t feel like stone or sand. It felt like walking on a pane of thick and hardened glass suspended over a bottomless ocean.

Every step he took sent a faint ripple of dull gray light outward into the void.

Aura materialized instantly.

The tiny Aether Sprite didn’t fly around him. She clung tightly to his pauldron.

Her three starlight tails were wrapped around his neck like a scarf. She was trembling.

"I know," Dante said quietly and rested a hand on the hilt of the [Crimson Edge]. "It feels wrong."

This wasn’t a standard dungeon room.

The Abyss difficulty had stopped throwing inflated bosses at him. It had dumped him into a quarantine zone.

Dante looked forward.

About fifty yards away and suspended slightly above the invisible glass floor was a shape.

It wasn’t a dragon or a giant armored golem. It was a grotesque and shifting mass.

It looked like a sphere of pure and concentrated dark matter, but the surface was constantly rippling.

Fleshy maws filled with mismatched razor-sharp teeth opened and closed randomly across its surface.

It didn’t have eyes. It didn’t have limbs.

It was just a floating and slumbrous orb of pure consumption.

The system interface struggled to compile the data.

The blue loading bar stuttered and flashed red before finally forcing the identification prompt into the vision of Dante.

[Floor Boss Spawn: Maw of the Void - Gluttony]

[Tier: Dark Demon]

[Level: 20]

[HP: 500,000 / 500,000]

Dante stared at the health pool.

Five hundred thousand health points. For a Level 20 boss.

The Annihilation-Tier Cerberus Void-Dragon had possessed a health pool in the millions, but it was a server-wipe mechanic designed for thousands of players to fight.

This was a contained and single-room boss scaled for a Level 20 encounter, and it possessed half a million health.

The mathematical density of the monster was completely absurd.

But it wasn’t just a monster.

Before Dante could even formulate a strategy, the black and jagged brand on his right wrist violently erupted in pain!

It was far worse than the burning sensation he had felt when talking to the Blade-Saint.

It felt like a white-hot nail was being driven directly into his digital veins.

Dante gritted his teeth and dropped to one knee on the glass floor. He grabbed his right forearm.

Thick and black smoke poured uncontrollably from the brand.

[Voidsever] forced itself into reality.

The primordial greatsword materialized in the grip of Dante without his command.

The weapon was vibrating so violently it threatened to shatter his iron gauntlet.

The dark bone hilt was freezing cold. The black blade actively pulled toward the slumbering mass of teeth and dark matter across the room.

The system interface flashed again and updated the lore profile of the boss.

[Anomaly Recognized.]

[Entity ’Gluttony’ is not a native Spire inhabitant.]

[Classification Updated: Corrupted Chaos Orb.]

[Description: The living and corrupted manifestation of a shattered primordial power core. Driven by an endless hunger.]

Dante looked at the sword in his hand, then looked at the boss.

The Blade-Saint had told him the truth.

Voidsever was missing its three Chaos Orbs. They had been scattered across the dimensions. And one of them had fallen into Outpost 404.

The system hadn’t generated this boss. The Spire of Ascension had simply been built over it to keep it contained.

"You want it back," Dante whispered and struggled to hold the massive black blade steady.

Voidsever hummed with a low and aggressive vibration that rattled the teeth of Dante.

It wanted its missing power core. It wanted to be whole.

But the Chaos Orb had been sitting in the dark for ten thousand years. It had mutated.

It wasn’t just a battery anymore. It had developed a crude and monstrous ego based entirely on consumption. It was a living thing now.

Dante forced himself to stand up. He tightened his grip on Voidsever and forced the blade to lower.

"Calm down," Dante ordered the sword. "If I just run over there and start swinging, we both die."

He needed to look at the mechanics. A Dark Demon boss with half a million health didn’t just stand there and take hits.

Dante pulled up the detailed combat interface and scanned the passive traits of the boss.

The text that appeared made his blood run completely cold.

[Passive 1: Absolute Absorption]

[Description: Gluttony feeds on energetic constructs. 100% of all magical, elemental, and ranged damage taken is instantly converted into healing. Spells do not damage the entity; they feed it.]

Dante immediately crossed [Wrath of the Firebird] and his new Zenith-tier lightning steroid off his mental list.

If he threw his massive forty-foot phoenix projection at the boss, the 1,000% fire damage wouldn’t burn it.

It would just act as a massive healing potion and instantly top off the 500,000 HP pool of the boss. Magic was completely useless here.

"Fine," Dante said. "Physical damage only. Good thing I have a sword."

He scrolled down to the second passive.

[Passive 2: Spiteful Carapace]

[Description: Gluttony rejects physical intrusion. Reflects 20% of all physical damage taken back to the attacker as unavoidable true damage. Reflection cannot be dodged or parried.]

Dante stopped breathing.

He stared at the prompt. He read it three times to make sure he wasn’t misinterpreting the terminology of the Zenith Protocol.

"Twenty percent reflection," Dante whispered.

He did the combat math in his head.

His current strategy for deleting bosses was simple.

He buffed his attack power, used [Voidsever] to ignore 100% of the armor of the target, and unleashed a Zenith-tier skill like [Abyssal Cleave] to deal astronomical physical damage.

Against the Earthfire Behemoths, he had dealt enough damage to break the text display of the system.

But if he did that here, he was dead.

If he used [Abyssal Cleave] and dealt a highly conservative 100,000 physical damage to Gluttony, the boss would take the hit.

But the [Spiteful Carapace] passive would instantly reflect 20% of that damage right back at Dante!

Twenty percent of 100,000 was 20,000 damage.

The absolute maximum health pool of Dante even with all his permanent elixirs and buffs was 9,130.

If he swung his sword at full power, he would instantly one-shot himself with his own reflected damage!

And because the reflection was classified as ’unavoidable true damage’, he couldn’t use [Aegis Deflection] to parry it.

"I cannot nuke it," Dante realized and a cold sweat broke out on his forehead. "If I hit it too hard, I commit suicide."

He couldn’t use [Doom’s Echo].

If the microscopic one-billion-percent damage multiplier triggered on a basic attack, the resulting reflection would be so massive it would probably fry his actual VR capsule back on Veridia.

He had to chip away at it.

He had to hit it with weak basic attacks. He needed to deal just enough damage that the 20% reflection wouldn’t exceed his health pool. This allowed Aura to heal him between strikes.

Chipping away at a 500,000 HP boss with basic attacks would take hours.

It was a grueling and miserable war of attrition.

Dante scrolled down to the third and final passive on the list.

[Passive 3: Endless Devour]

[Description: Gluttony possesses an unavoidable and spatial grab. If the target is caught within the Devour radius, they are instantly consumed. Inflicts True Death. Bypasses all standard status immunities and invulnerability frames. Cooldown: Variable.]

Dante closed the interface.

The silence in the eerie void felt heavier now.

The [Aetherial Nectar] granted him immunity to standard instant-death curses.

But [Endless Devour] wasn’t a poison or a curse. It was a structural deletion.

The boss literally just ate the avatar of the player.

If he got grabbed, he was dead. The invulnerability frames from [Phantom Waltz] wouldn’t save him.

He looked at the slumbering and shifting mass of maws fifty yards away.

"So," Dante said and spoke aloud just to hear a voice in the dark.

"If I use magic, it heals. If I hit it with a heavy physical attack, I instantly die to the reflection. And if I get too close and it grabs me, I get eaten and my account gets deleted."

Aura chimed nervously and pressed against his neck.

Dante didn’t have an army. He didn’t have the suppression scrolls of Malric.

He was completely alone in a suspended server partition.

He was facing a boss that mathematically countered every single broken mechanic he had acquired over the last twenty-four hours.

Brute force was completely off the table.

"You want a slow fight?" Dante asked and gripped the bone hilt of Voidsever. "Fine. We do it the hard way."

Dante dismissed the primordial greatsword.

The black blade dissolved into smoke and returned to the brand on his wrist. He couldn’t risk using it.

The armor-piercing passive made his basic attacks hit too hard. The reflection would be too difficult to manage.

He drew the [Crimson Edge]. The Silver-grade broadsword was much weaker. It was exactly what he needed.

The metallic scrape of the sword leaving its scabbard echoed across the invisible glass floor.

Fifty yards away, the slumbering mass of dark matter reacted to the noise.

The dozens of fleshy and jagged maws covering the surface of the sphere snapped open simultaneously.

The entity didn’t have eyes, but it instantly locked onto the coordinates of Dante.

The massive orb of corruption floated slightly higher into the air.

The maws began to rapidly gnash together and generate a horrific and wet clicking sound that filled the void.

Gluttony was awake.

The boss didn’t charge. It didn’t roar.

It simply floated forward. Its dark matter body shifted and pulsated. It was eager to consume the first piece of physical matter it had encountered in ten thousand years.

Dante dropped into a low and defensive stance.

He couldn’t burst it. He couldn’t block it. He just had to survive it.