Dante was completely alone in the dark.

For the last two hours, he had been surviving purely on instinct, spatial awareness, and a ridiculous amount of luck.

The suspended server partition was entirely silent save for the wet and horrific clicking of the dozens of maws of Gluttony.

Aura was gone. She was safely locked in her pet-space to prevent her structural deletion.

Without her infinite and percentage-based healing, Dante was fighting a losing battle.

He was systematically chipping away at the Dark Demon boss with basic and unbuffed strikes from the [Crimson Edge]. 𝘧𝓇ℯ𝑒𝓌𝑒𝑏𝓃𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘭.𝒸ℴ𝓂

Every single time he landed a hit, the [Spiteful Carapace] passive reflected 20% of the damage back into his avatar as unavoidable true damage.

[-220 HP]

[-180 HP]

[-240 HP]

The numbers had slowly and agonizingly stacked up.

Dante triggered [Blink Step] and teleported backward to dodge a massive sweeping tentacle that crashed into the invisible glass floor where he had just been standing. He landed heavily, and his boots skidded.

He didn’t immediately follow up with a strike. He needed to breathe.

[Participant: Dan]

[HP: 2,150 / 9,130]

[Stamina: 400 / 1,200]

He was critically wounded.

His stamina was burning out faster than [Breath of the Colossus] could passively regenerate it.

This was simply because he was constantly forced to chain Zenith-tier mobility skills just to stay out of the lethal reach of the boss.

He looked across the void.

[Gluttony HP: 140,000 / 500,000]

Dante let out a dry and exhausted laugh. "I am not going to make it."

The math was finally catching up to him.

Even if he played perfectly and never took a direct hit from a tentacle, he couldn’t kill the boss.

He needed to deal another 140,000 physical damage to empty its health bar. The 20% reflection on that damage was 28,000 HP.

He only had 2,150 HP left.

If he kept swinging his sword, he would mathematically kill himself before the boss even hit ten percent health.

"I need Damage over Time," Dante muttered and wiped digital sweat from his forehead. "I need damage over time that does not count as a direct physical strike."

But [Staff of Cinders] dealt fire damage.

If he equipped the Gold-tier staff and tried to burn the boss, the [Absolute Absorption] passive of Gluttony would instantly convert the fire magic into healing. It would completely undo hours of grueling work.

Physical attacks killed him. Magic healed it.

Dante kept backing up as the massive sphere of dark matter slowly floated toward him.

He opened his infinite inventory and frantically scrolled through the hundreds of items he had vacuumed up during his speedrun of the Spire.

He needed an item that inflicted a physical debuff without relying on elemental or magical scaling.

He scrolled past the silver coins, the heavy armor, and the stat crystals.

His eyes locked onto a single isolated inventory slot at the very bottom of the grid.

Sitting in the slot was a delicate and glowing crimson flower.

[Item Appraised: Bloom of Decay]

[Tier: Lore Item (Cursed)]

[Toxicity Level: Absolute]

[Description: A highly concentrated physical manifestation of primordial rot. If consumed or applied to an open wound, the Bloom inflicts an un-cleansable and permanent ’Decay’ debuff. The target will lose 10% of their Maximum HP every second until True Death occurs. Ignores all standard immunities.]

Dante stared at the prompt.

It was the "thank you" gift from Aria. She was the number one ranked Hidden Class player who had tried to casually assassinate him back in Outpost 404.

"Ten percent of maximum HP every second," Dante read aloud. "Un-cleansable. Ignores immunities."

It wasn’t magic. It wasn’t fire or ice.

It was a physical manifestation of primordial rot. The system classified it as a disease. It completely bypassed standard combat mitigation mechanics.

Dante didn’t hesitate. He pulled the glowing crimson flower out of his inventory.

He held it carefully by the absolute bottom of the stem to ensure the glowing petals didn’t brush against his iron gauntlet.

"Alright, ugly," Dante yelled across the void and waved the flower. "You want to eat something? Eat this."

Gluttony didn’t have eyes, but it recognized the taunt.

The dark matter sphere pulsed violently. The dozens of localized maws across its surface snapped shut simultaneously.

Dante recognized the animation instantly. It was the exact same wind-up the boss had used an hour ago.

[Boss Mechanic Triggered: Endless Devour.]

"Here we go," Dante whispered and lowered his stance.

He didn’t have Aura to pop a reality-bending invulnerability dome this time.

If he got caught in the gravitational pull, his avatar was gone permanently.

The dark matter sphere violently expanded and turned itself inside out.

The black hole erupted into existence and instantly generated a massive inescapable gravitational vacuum.

Dante didn’t try to run away. You couldn’t outrun a black hole.

He triggered [Meteor Stride].

He didn’t aim backward. He aimed straight into the center of the expanding darkness.

He vanished in a flash of white-hot light and left a thick trail of plasma behind him.

He materialized exactly three feet in front of the massive gaping maw of the expanding black hole.

The gravitational pull grabbed his avatar instantly and dragged him forward with terrifying inescapable force.

He was being sucked directly into the execution zone.

Dante didn’t panic. He raised his right hand and kept the [Bloom of Decay] held tightly between his fingers.

The dark void rushed up to meet him.

He threw the crimson flower directly into the center of the expanding black hole.

The moment the flower left his hand, Dante immediately triggered his second Zenith-tier mobility skill.

[Skill Executed: Phantom Waltz]

He didn’t use it to attack. He used it purely for the invulnerability frames.

The purple pulsating aura completely enveloped him.

He became utterly untargetable by the combat engine of the game.

The massive gravitational pull of the black hole washed straight through his digital form and completely failed to register his presence.

He was inside the event horizon, but he wasn’t taking damage.

He used the teleporting strikes of the skill to aggressively pull himself backward out of the expanding void.

Crack. Crack. Crack.

He blinked rapidly in reverse and teleported thirty, sixty, and ninety feet backward.

He fought the gravitational current by exploiting the instantaneous spatial displacement of the assassination skill.

He materialized a hundred feet away completely clear of the mechanic of the boss. He dropped to one knee as the purple invulnerability frames faded.

He looked up.

The [Bloom of Decay] had been completely sucked into the center of the black hole.

The massive expanding void suddenly stopped.

It didn’t collapse back into the dark matter sphere like it had before.

It violently shuddered, and the dark edges glitched with a sickly bright red static.

A massive blaring red icon appeared directly over the health bar of the boss.

[Debuff Applied: Absolute Decay.]

The system interface hitched as it struggled to process the interaction between an un-cleansable Lore item and a Dark Demon boss.

Then, the math executed.

Ten percent of the 500,000 Maximum HP of the boss was 50,000 damage.

The damage ticked.

[-50,000 HP!]

Gluttony let out a horrifying high-pitched screech of digitized static.

The boss didn’t have vocal cords, but the sound of its code literally rotting away echoed through the silent void.

The dark matter sphere violently collapsed back into its normal shifting shape to completely cancel the [Endless Devour] animation.

But the damage didn’t stop. The debuff ticked every single second.

[-50,000 HP!]

Because the damage was classified as an internal system debuff and not a physical strike originating from the player, the [Spiteful Carapace] passive didn’t trigger.

Dante wasn’t taking a single point of reflection damage.

Dante slowly stood up and leaned heavily on the [Crimson Edge].

His stamina bar was completely bottomed out from chaining the Zenith-tier mobility skills. He was barely holding his avatar upright.

He watched the health bar of the boss plummet.

[Gluttony HP: 40,000 / 500,000]

The boss was dying. The primordial rot was devouring its digital structure from the inside out.

But Gluttony was a living manifestation of pure consumption. It didn’t possess a flight instinct. It didn’t know how to retreat.

As its health bar dropped into the critical red zone, the dark matter sphere flared with a violent unstable energy.

It completely abandoned its defensive passives. The maws disappeared. The tentacles dissolved.

The entire sphere condensed into a tight and incredibly dense core of pure dark matter.

[Boss Mechanic Triggered: Dying Star.]

The Intuition stat of Dante screamed.

The boss wasn’t going to just quietly rot away.

It was going to self-destruct and take the entire suspended server partition down with it in a localized supernova of pure void energy.

The core began to rapidly expand. It glowed with a blinding and terrifying purple light.

"No, you do not," Dante gritted his teeth and forced his exhausted avatar to move.

The rot ticked one final time.

[-50,000 HP! OVERKILL!]

The health bar of the boss completely zeroed out.

But the self-destruct animation was already locked in.

The system engine had initiated the explosion sequence before the health pool officially registered as empty. The expanding purple light reached critical mass.

Dante didn’t have [Phantom Waltz].

It was on a 45-second cooldown because he hadn’t secured a kill during the animation.

He didn’t have [Blink Step]. His stamina bar was sitting at absolute zero.

He couldn’t dodge.

The localized supernova detonated.

A wave of pure and unfiltered dark matter exploded outward. It washed over the invisible glass floor at the speed of light.

Dante raised the [Crimson Edge] and braced for impact. He fully knew it was entirely useless.

He was sitting at 2,150 HP. The explosion was going to deal millions of damage.

"Aura!" Dante yelled. His voice was desperate.

He didn’t know if she even had the energy to manifest, but he triggered the master command anyway.

A tiny, flickering, and dull gray spark popped into existence directly in front of his chest.

Aura materialized.

She was barely holding her digital form together.

She didn’t have the cosmic energy left to cast her reality-bending invulnerability dome. She didn’t have the energy to cast her passive cleanse.

But she didn’t need to.

She let out a weak and static-filled chime.

[Skill Activated: Resurgence]

It was the final ultimate ability in her stat block. It was the skill she could only use once every twenty-four hours.

The massive wave of dark matter slammed into Dante.

The [Sun-Forged Cuirass] instantly shattered. The [Crimson Edge] vaporized in his hands.

His avatar was completely and instantly consumed by the explosion. His health bar dropped from 2,150 to absolutely nothing in a single frame.

[-9,999,999! FATAL DAMAGE!]

[Participant ’Dan’ HP has reached 0.]

For a fraction of a millisecond, the system queued up the True Death parameters.

The server prepared to send the lethal disconnect signal to the VR capsule of Dante on Veridia.

The signal never sent.

Aura completely dissolved.

The tiny Aether Sprite didn’t return to her pet-space.

She sacrificed her remaining physical manifestation entirely. She turned into a burst of pure and unadulterated cosmic reset code.

The silver light washed over the spot where Dante had just been vaporized.

The dark matter explosion continued outward and faded into the void. But the center of the blast radius completely reversed.

Dante materialized.

He didn’t reform slowly. He snapped back into reality instantly and stood in the exact same spot.

His [Sun-Forged Cuirass] was flawless. The [Crimson Edge] was sheathed at his hip.

[Resurgence Triggered.]

[Target resurrected at 100% HP and Mana.]

[Absolute Invulnerability Applied. Duration: 3 seconds.]

Dante took a massive shuddering gasp of air. His stamina was completely full. His health bar was sitting perfectly at 9,130.

He looked down. Aura was gone.

The pet icon on his interface was grayed out. It indicated she was locked in a 24-hour dormant state to reconstruct her digital body.

He looked up.

The explosion was over. The dark matter sphere was gone.

The True Final Floor of the Spire of Ascension was completely and absolutely silent.