Dante read the panel a second time, slower.Ten percent of Vorak's stats, transferred and sitting inside him like money deposited into an account he hadn't known existed. One extra life, clean and attached, no conditions except the one that mattered. And one ability waiting for him to reach in and take it.He understood the extra life mechanic down to its bones. One Fallen, one shield between him and whatever tried to end him. The Fallen died instead. Simple, brutal, perfect. He turned the math over in his head and felt something close to joy, the quiet, dangerous kind that comes from understanding you've found a rule the world didn't mean to show you.A thousand Fallen. Ten thousand. Death would have to get in line and wait its turn forever.Then the word stopped him again.Physical.He read it three more times, pulling it apart, looking at what it left uncovered. A body dying, the Fallen took it. Clean. But what lived in a body wasn't only meat and bone. What happened when something

Luna sat beside Angelina with her knees pulled up, her silver hair loose and falling across her shoulder in a way she hadn't bothered to fix. Angelina watched her with eyes too wide and too soft for someone who'd spent the last several hours surviving a mountain, the kind of eyes that belonged to someone younger than the body carrying them."Is it true," Angelina said, her voice careful, like she was handling something breakable, "that elven herbs can close a wound without leaving any mark at all?"Luna looked at her. "Depends on the herb and the wound.""I read that elven medicine is centuries ahead of anything humans have developed." Angelina leaned forward slightly. "That some of your plants can regrow bone.""Some can.""That's incredible."Luna said nothing to that, but something in her posture shifted by a degree, the particular shift of someone who has been told their home is beautiful so many times by people who've never seen it that the compliment has stopped meaning anything

Antonio's sword came up."Chiara, back line, keep the blessing running." His voice carried the practiced sharpness of someone who had trained for command since before he was old enough to want it. "Angelina, Nico, Twin Technique. Move."Chiara stepped back without argument, raised both palms, and began the chant under her breath, the words low and continuous like a thread being pulled from somewhere deep. A faint green light built in her hands and spread outward, washing across all of them in one quiet pulse.Blessing of Pulse, active. Stamina recovery rate increased by five percent. Temporary flame resistance granted. Duration: one minute.One minute.Antonio looked at the burning mountain standing over them and understood with complete clarity that one minute was a number that meant almost nothing right now.Angelina and Nico didn't wait.They moved together the way two people move when they've drilled the same sequence for so long the body does it without asking the brain for permi

Dante stepped down from the rock and picked up Antonio's sword.The cracked blade sat wrong in the hand, the fracture running diagonal from tip toward the guard, the kind of damage that tells you the metal gave everything it had and came up short. He turned it once, feeling the weight distribution, the balance point, the way the grip had been worn down by someone who held it tighter than they needed to. He hadn't used swords much. Didn't matter. He understood the principle well enough.He started walking toward Ragzar.His eyes moved across the monster the way you read something you need to understand quickly, cataloguing it, building the picture. He'd never seen anything like this in the online community records, not described, not referenced, not even rumored. B-rank, fire-type, corruption class. At full power, bringing something like this down would require two or three B-ranks working in combination, coordinated and precise. Nobody below that walked away clean from a fight with th

Antonio's voice came up fast and loud, the way a person's voice goes when something inside them breaks open and the pressure finds the nearest exit."Who do you think you are." His lips were shaking, the words pushing out between them like they couldn't get through fast enough. "You call me trash? You call me garbage? Do you have any idea who my father is? Do you have any idea what name you're standing in front of, you worthless, parentless, nobody E-rank piece of—"The slap landed.The sound of it crossed the clearing and came back off the rock face behind them, loud and flat and final, like a door slamming on everything Antonio had been building toward. His head went sideways with it, his feet shuffling a step to keep his body from following. The red bloomed across his cheek instantly.He stood there.For three full seconds, he stood there and stared at nothing, too stunned to land on the next word, his mouth open around a curse that had forgotten where it was going."How dare you."