Chapter 68: The Boss Goes Berserk

"That’s a level 38 Legendary. All four stats sitting past 1,300 that’s not supposed to be possible this early."

"Thank god we brought the boss with us tonight. The four of us alone, we could’ve leveled three more times and still walked out of here in pieces."

The sheer scale of the thing at the end of the canyon had the rest of the party visibly shaken, breath catching audibly as the full weight of its stat block sank in.

Kael’s brow furrowed, faint and almost imperceptible not from fear, but disappointment.

He’d come on this run for one reason beyond the loot split: a shot at filling his fifth companion slot.

Anything standing at the end of an S-rank instance carried real potential, and part of the appeal of tagging along with Alexis’s party had been finding out exactly what this canyon had waiting at the bottom of it.

The Hollowgale Tyrant delivered on raw stats. What it didn’t deliver was fit. Pure melee, through and through a role already covered twice over between Wraithlord and Void Leviathan.

Taming it would mean redundancy, not expansion."Looks like the fifth slot’s still an open question," he murmured, mostly to himself.

Without further ceremony, and without treating the Legendary-tier boss with anywhere near the reverence the rest of the party clearly thought it deserved, he cracked the Wyrmscale Serpentlash once and sent all three companions in at a dead run.

Of his three primary companions, only Void Leviathan currently sat below the top tier Gold-grade, with Wraithlord and Thunder Roc both already sitting fully Legendary in their own right.

Baseline, their attribute growth already outpaced what a Legendary-grade boss should carry at this level, and the Beastlord passive stacked a flat fifty percent on top of that.

Even accounting for the seven-level gap working against them, the raw numbers landed close enough to even that it barely mattered.

Void Leviathan, the one genuine underdog in the fight, still had enough banked health and sustain through Abyssal Hunger to cover the gap on its own.

All three companions converged on the Tyrant at once, and the fight that followed was immediately, visibly brutal not the one-sided slaughter the canyon’s lesser monsters had offered all night, but something closer to an actual contest.

Level-difference suppression clawed back some of the advantage Kael’s companions should have carried, turning what should have been a clean beatdown into a real, grinding fight.

Alexis and the rest of the party threw themselves in too, for whatever it was worth.

Against something this far above their level, their damage barely registered single-digit scratches, more about feeling involved than actually contributing.

Ten minutes of sustained pressure finally wore the Tyrant’s health bar down to a bare tenth of its total.

Anticipation crept back into every face watching, the earlier dread giving way to something greedier.

An S-rank final boss, nearly down whatever dropped off a kill like this was going to be worth remembering.

Then everything changed at once.

Still standing, still covered in wounds from three companions working it over simultaneously, the Hollowgale Tyrant threw its head back and roared and a wave of raw

Violent force exploded outward from its body, hurling Wraithlord, Void Leviathan, and a diving Thunder Roc away like they weighed nothing at all.

Crimson lightning crackled through the air around its frame as gale winds tore across the clearing, and its already massive silhouette swelled further still, growing more monstrous, more oppressive, with every passing second.

"Notification: Legendary-tier boss Hollowgale Tyrant has reached critical health. Its full bloodline potential has unleashed entering Berserk. All attributes +40%. Regenerates 1% max health every 5 seconds. Drop rate increased 200%. Duration: 180 seconds."

The reaction was immediate.

"It went berserk?!"

"Forty percent across the board, AND it’s healing on a timer? What’s even the point of fighting that?"

Shock rippled through the party hard enough to show on every face.

Even Kael’s expression sobered. He hadn’t accounted for this a genuine berserk-phase boss was rare enough that most players went their entire careers without encountering one firsthand.

The Tyrant’s base stats had already demanded all three companions working in concert just to hold steady ground.

A flat forty percent boost on top of that pushed it somewhere past what even three Legendary-caliber companions could comfortably handle unassisted.

But bigger risk always came bundled with bigger reward. A tripled drop rate, stacked on top of the Ring of Infinite Fortune’s already-warped odds, all but guaranteed something worth remembering if they actually closed this fight out.

Something sharp and long-missing lit behind Kael’s eyes at the thought.

He’d meant to call out a warning first stay clear, let the companions handle a target this volatile alone.

He never got the chance.

Out of pure habit, Farshot loosed an arrow the instant the opening presented itself, the shot burying itself dead center in the Tyrant’s chest.

-3

Barely a scratch. More than enough, though, to pull its attention.

A pair of crimson eyes swept toward the party, burning with raw, undiluted fury.

The Tyrant roared, raised one massive hand, and closed its fist in a slow, deliberate grasping motion aimed directly at them.

A black wind tore loose from nothing, howling across the clearing with the force of a physical blow.

Kael, Frostbloom, Farshot, and SilentDrifter all stood inside its radius when it hit.

Wind sliced through armor like it wasn’t there, opening deep, violent wounds across all four of them in the same instant.

Three health bars collapsed to zero before anyone had time to react Frostbloom managing only a short, strangled cry before her body dissolved into white light, yanked straight out of the instance along with Farshot and SilentDrifter in the same breath.

Kael alone had enough time to react. Bloodbind flared to life a half-second before the wind reached him, rerouting the bulk of the damage straight through to Void Leviathan instead.

Between that and his own considerable base stats, he came through the attack standing bruised, bleeding, but standing.

Void Leviathan took the brunt of it badly, health dropping by nearly a third in a single exchange.

And still, Kael found himself grinning.

Ever since this second life began, every encounter had bent instantly under the sheer weight of his advantages class, talent, bloodline, all of it stacking so far past the curve that nothing had genuinely tested him in longer than he could comfortably remember.

Crushing everything in his path had its satisfactions. It had also, somewhere along the way, started to feel a little thin.

This a boss actually capable of drawing blood, forcing real decisions, punishing a careless opening this was the first real fight he’d had since stepping back into Ascension.

The old hunger surfaced in full, the part of him that had spent a lifetime chasing exactly this feeling before it had ever had a name attached to it.

Blood up, pulse quick, every instinct sharpening to a point.

He let out a short, sharp laugh, hefted the Wyrmscale Serpentlash, and charged straight into the Tyrant’s path without a flicker of hesitation a hundred and eighty seconds on the clock, three companions regrouping behind him, and finally, finally, a fight worth having.