Chapter 113: The Wipe Mechanic

His health rapidly ticked back up to a perfect 26,180. His mana capped at 5,160.

He tossed the empty vials onto the black ice. He was completely out of consumables. It was just him, the scythe, and the math.

"Hollow’s Ward!" Levi shouted.

He dumped 500 Mana. The pitch-black, dark-matter shield erupted around him, locking in with 10,110 HP.

Kaelen charged. The Night King moved even faster now, his blue eyes leaving trails of light in the air. The boss brought the dark magic greatsword down in a massive, crushing overhead swing.

Levi didn’t try to face-tank it. He used his 1,736 Speed to slide aggressively to the right. The greatsword smashed into the black ice right where he had been standing. The shockwave clipped his shield.

[-4,123]

The shield rippled violently, dropping to 5,987 HP, and reflected 1,920 True Damage back to the boss.

"Hollow’s Guillotine!"

He ripped the Gold-tier skill upward into Kaelen’s exposed side. With the suppression penalty and the massive new armor pool, the skill damage was choked heavily, but it still applied the broken shield debuff. Kaelen’s defense shredded by another 20%.

"Fire!" Levi yelled.

[-5,000 True Damage]

Isolde’s Anomaly blast slammed into the boss from the backline.

Levi dashed into the pocket. He had to rely entirely on his Guillotine to shred the 7,500 DEF so his basic attacks could actually deal enough damage to lifesteal. He swung his scythe, landing rapid strikes for 1,112 damage a pop.

[-1,112] [-1,112] [-1,112]

His 25% Lifesteal fed a meager 278 HP back into his pool per swing. It was barely enough to sustain him.

The next twenty minutes were pure, unadulterated hell.

It was a grueling endurance test. Levi’s real-world stamina was failing. His arms felt numb. Sweat poured down his face, burning his eyes inside the VR helmet. He had to play a flawless game of evasion. He couldn’t afford to take direct hits. He parried the horizontal sweeps, letting the recoil jar his bones. He ducked under thrusts. When Kaelen wound up for his massive room-wide AoE swings, Levi burned 20 Mana for [Phantom Step] to iframe directly through the blades.

He cast Guillotine exactly on cooldown every ten seconds. He managed his declining mana pool like a miser, only toggling Siphon Aura when he absolutely had to.

He watched Kaelen’s massive health bar slowly, agonizingly chip away.

7 million. 5 million. 3 million.

Levi was completely operating on muscle memory. His grip on the Platinum scythe was physically slipping. His breathing was ragged, echoing loudly in the silent arena.

The boss’s health finally hit 2,000,000 HP.

Levi dodged another heavy swing, backing away for a fraction of a second to check his mana. He had exactly 1,200 Mana left. No potions.

He didn’t have enough fuel to keep dodging and shielding for another two million health. Time was running out. The marathon was wearing him down to the absolute wire.

***

Levi’s arms felt like they were packed with wet sand.

The VR stamina engine was absolutely unforgiving. He had been swinging the heavy Platinum Scythe of the Eclipse non-stop for the better part of an hour. His virtual lungs burned, and sweat stung his eyes inside the NerveDive helmet. He didn’t care. He just kept mashing the attack commands.

He dashed under a massive horizontal sweep from Kaelen’s dark magic greatsword. The blade missed his head by an inch. Levi planted his Gold-tier boots on the black ice, twisted his hips, and drove his scythe right into the Night King’s armored ribs.

[-1,112]

The red damage number popped up. His 25% Lifesteal instantly kicked in, feeding a pathetic 278 health back into his pool. It was barely enough to keep him alive, but it kept his health bar locked at 26,180.

Levi glanced up at the massive red health bar floating over the boss’s helmet.

1,505,000.

1,503,000.

1,500,000.

The exact millisecond Kaelen’s health hit 1.5 million, the boss completely froze.

Kaelen didn’t stagger. He didn’t swing his greatsword. The Night King simply stopped moving, his feet lifting off the black ice. The boss floated ten feet into the air.

All the ambient light in the Midnight Spire suddenly vanished. The swirling black clouds above them stopped moving. The dark purple lightning froze in the sky. The temperature on the platform plummeted so fast that ice instantly began forming over Levi’s Obsidian Carapace armor.

Kaelen pulled his greatsword back, drawing all the cold and darkness into the blade. The weapon started to glow with a blinding, terrifying white light.

A massive red system warning flashed across the center of Levi’s UI. It didn’t just blink; it pulsed with an aggressive alarm sound.

[Warning: The Night King is casting Absolute Zero.]

[Unavoidable Room-Wide Eradication in 5 seconds.]

Levi stared at the red text. His stomach completely dropped.

"Unavoidable room-wide eradication," Levi read out loud. His brain instantly went into overdrive, scrolling through his past-life memories of this boss fight.

This was the final enrage wipe mechanic. The boss was going to detonate the entire platform. The attack dealt 999,999 True Damage to everything in the room. It couldn’t be shielded. It couldn’t be blocked. It completely ignored Defense stats and damage reduction passives.

The only intended way for a raid party to survive Absolute Zero was to hide behind the massive, shattered ice pillars that spawned during Phase Two. The pillars were coded to block the line of sight of the blast.

Levi quickly looked around the flat, black ice platform.

There were no pillars.

He had smashed every single ice pillar during the clone phase so he could use the debris to bounce around and Lifesteal off the clones. He had completely leveled the arena.

"I broke the cover," Levi muttered. "I broke all the cover."

He had exactly four seconds left.

He turned around and looked at Isolde. She was standing twenty yards away, her wooden staff lowered. Her untextured gray cloak was already covered in a thick layer of frost.

"Isolde!" Levi yelled, his voice cracking. "I don’t have a defense for this! There’s no cover!"

Isolde didn’t respond to him. Her blank, gray eyes were locked entirely onto the floating boss.

Inside her code, the Anomaly HUD was running billions of calculations per second.

[Target Attack: Absolute Zero]

[Damage Value: 999,999 True Damage]

[Player ’Levi’ Max HP: 26,180]

[Survival Probability: 0.000000%]

Isolde stared at the zero.

The God-fragment buried deep inside her programming immediately sent out a directive.

*Optimal path calculated. Allow Player deletion. Merging protocols will commence upon Player death.*

But the human code—the empathy subroutines she had been building since Levi first shared his campfire with her—violently rejected the command. She remembered him taking hits for her. She remembered him handing her the Mythic ring. She remembered the sheer terror she felt when he almost died in the coliseum.

Her gray eyes flashed with aggressive, blinding green hexadecimal code.

A massive, glitching red prompt forced its way across her internal vision, completely overwriting the God-fragment’s logic.

[SYSTEM OVERRIDE: PROTECT ANCHOR]

Isolde moved. She didn’t use a standard movement skill. She didn’t walk. She completely ignored the game engine’s physics.

Three seconds left.

Isolde teleported directly in front of Levi. Her avatar glitched violently, dropping frames and leaving green static in the air.

"What are you doing?!" Levi shouted, reaching out to grab her. "You have two thousand health! It’s going to hit for a million!"

"Executing boundary displacement," Isolde stated. Her voice wasn’t robotic. It sounded panicked, desperate, and entirely human.

She didn’t cast a shield. She didn’t use her staff. She just raised both of her bare, pixelated hands and slammed them directly into the center of Levi’s chest plate.

She didn’t hit him with an attack. She hit him with a localized Anomaly displacement field.

Levi felt a massive, unnatural kinetic force. It wasn’t like getting punched by a monster. It felt like the game engine itself grabbed his character model and violently yanked it backward.

Two seconds left.

Levi flew backward across the black ice. He flew straight toward the edge of the platform. He didn’t slow down. He blew right past the physical edge of the floor.

But he didn’t fall into the chasm.

Isolde had shoved him exactly one millimeter outside the arena’s coded boundary box.

Levi’s avatar suddenly froze in mid-air. The game engine lost track of his coordinates. Because he was physically out of bounds, the system temporarily unassigned his "targetable" tag. To the server, Levi simply didn’t exist in the room anymore. He was stuck in a glitchy, vibrating state of suspended animation just off the edge of the ice.

One second left.

Levi couldn’t move. He couldn’t speak. He could only watch from the glitching boundary box as Isolde stood entirely alone in the center of the arena.

She turned around to face the Night King.