Chapter 131: The Sky-Tyrant’s Fall, Enrage Mechanic

He didn’t care about the physical damage portion of the skill. The game engine registered the skill as a weapon attack, which meant the 5% True Damage passive applied to the entire AoE cone.

The dark-gold energy ripped completely through Garuda’s body.

[-2,500,000 True Damage]

The blast shredded the compressed wind on the boss’s lower wings, permanently crippling its flight mechanics.

Levi stood in front of the grounded, paralyzed World Boss and just went to work. He swung the Diamond scythe like an executioner chopping wood. Every single hit deleted exactly five percent of the boss’s health.

40 million. 30 million. 20 million.

The falling island continued to plummet toward the digital ocean below, but the fight inside the crater was already over. Levi was just waiting for the math to hit zero.

***

The massive steel-and-tree nest inside the crater was completely falling apart.

The falling island was hurtling toward the digital ocean below at terminal velocity. The gravitational sheer was violently tearing the landscape to shreds. Boulders the size of houses ripped loose from the crater walls and tumbled straight up into the sky. The wind pressure was so intense it felt like a solid brick wall pressing against Levi’s chest.

He didn’t care. He just kept swinging the Diamond-tier Scythe of the Shattered Heavens.

"Hollow’s Guillotine!" Levi shouted.

The dark-gold energy ripped completely through Garuda’s massive avian body. The physical damage portion of the skill was totally erased by the 115% Level Suppression penalty, but it didn’t matter. The weapon’s passive triggered perfectly across the entire area-of-effect cone.

[-2,500,000 True Damage]

Garuda shrieked. The sound was deafening, like two massive sheets of metal scraping together.

Levi checked the massive red health bar floating over the World Boss’s head. He had been chopping away five percent of its health with every single swing.

20 million. 15 million.

"Keep it locked down!" Levi yelled over the roaring wind.

"Gravity Well parameters holding at maximum capacity," Isolde replied. She was standing at the edge of the nest, her untextured gray cloak whipping wildly in the updraft. Her wooden staff pointed directly at the boss, anchoring the giant bird to the rocky floor so it couldn’t fly away.

Levi stepped into the pocket and swung his scythe two more times in rapid succession.

[-2,500,000 True Damage]

[-2,500,000 True Damage]

Garuda’s health bar violently chunked down.

10,000,000 HP.

Exactly twenty percent of the boss’s maximum health.

The moment the red bar hit the ten million mark, the boss completely ignored Isolde’s Gravity Well. The game engine forcefully triggered the enrage phase, snapping the boss out of the crowd-control effect.

A massive, aggressive red system warning flashed across Levi’s UI.

[Warning: The Sky-Tyrant is Enraged.]

[Initiating Aether Detonation.]

Garuda didn’t try to bite him. It didn’t try to swing its razor-wind wings. The giant bird threw its head back and let out a horrific, glitching scream. The four massive wings made of compressed wind currents suddenly stopped moving. They froze in mid-air and began to glow with a blinding, terrifying white light.

"It’s blowing up its own wings," Levi muttered, his eyes going wide.

He didn’t have time to run. He didn’t have time to cast a shield.

The boss self-destructed.

The four razor-wind wings violently detonated, compressing all of the ambient Aether in the crater into a single, room-wide nuke of raw energy. It was a completely unavoidable, targeted wipe mechanic. There was no hitbox to dodge. It just covered the entire screen in white light.

The blast slammed into Levi.

The VR pain engine hissed, sending a horrible, full-body shockwave through his avatar that literally made his teeth rattle inside his helmet.

The defensive math processed on his UI in a fraction of a millisecond.

Garuda’s base Attack was 40,000. The enrage mechanic automatically doubled the boss’s attack power for the detonation, pushing it to a massive 80,000.

Levi’s current Defense was sitting at exactly 2,054.

80,000 minus 2,054 meant a raw incoming hit of 77,946 damage. Because Levi didn’t have his Diamond-tier 50% damage reduction necklace anymore, there was nothing to mitigate the blast.

[-77,946]

The massive red number exploded across his screen.

His Shared HP pool with Isolde took a horrific hit. It plummeted from a perfect 115,180 straight down to 37,234.

The white light cleared. Levi was on one knee, his Gold-tier boots dug deep into the cracked stone of the nest. He coughed, spitting a glob of virtual blood onto the rocks.

"Your health pool has reached suboptimal levels," Isolde stated. She had taken the exact same hit through their tether, but she didn’t sound panicked.

"I’m fine," Levi grunted. He pushed himself up using the haft of his scythe. "That was its best shot. Now it’s my turn."

He looked at the boss. Garuda was grounded, its wings completely gone, but the red health bar was still sitting at ten million HP.

Levi didn’t even blink. He opened his skill menu with a quick thought-command.

"Abyssal Overdrive!" Levi roared.

The system instantly registered the command.

[Abyssal Overdrive: Activated]

[Cost: 50% Current HP, 1,000 Mana]

His health bar took another violent hit. Fifty percent of his current 37,234 HP was ripped away, dropping him down to 18,617. His mana pool drained by 1,000 points.

But the buffs triggered instantly. A terrifying, towering aura of pitch-black flames erupted from his Obsidian Carapace armor, whipping into the air and distorting the wind around him.

[Speed +100% Active]

[Level Suppression Nullified]

[Final Damage +150% Active]

Levi’s Speed stat didn’t just bump. It instantly doubled from 1,636 to 3,272.

He vanished.

He didn’t run. He just blinked completely out of visual rendering. He reappeared directly in the center of Garuda’s chest, right where the wings used to be.

He didn’t bother using a skill. He just gripped the Diamond scythe with both hands and started a rapid-fire blender of basic physical attacks.

The Overdrive multiplier applied a massive 2.5x modifier to his physical damage, but against a Level 85 World Boss, his raw physical damage was still largely irrelevant. What mattered was the scythe’s True Damage passive.

The True Damage flat-lined the boss regardless of the Overdrive multiplier.

He swung the blade.

[-2,500,000 True Damage]

He used frame-linking to cancel the heavy recoil animation of the scythe. With his absurd 3,272 Speed, he just kept twitching his wrists, resetting the attack animation instantly.

He landed four strikes in exactly one second.

[-2,500,000 True Damage]

[-2,500,000 True Damage]

[-2,500,000 True Damage]

Exactly ten million True Damage processed in a single second.

Garuda’s remaining health bar completely evaporated. It didn’t even have time to trigger a death animation.

The Level 85 World Boss froze, letting out a glitching, distorted screech before violently shattering into billions of glowing blue and gold polygons.

The exact millisecond the boss died, the entire falling island lurched.

The system registered the defeat of the World Boss. The kinetic force dragging the island down toward the digital ocean was instantly neutralized. The massive chunk of rock stopped falling.

The inertia hit Levi hard. He actually stumbled, falling onto his back on the rocky floor of the nest as gravity aggressively corrected itself.

The island hovered perfectly still in the lower atmosphere, completely stabilized.

"Target eliminated," Isolde said, walking over to him. "Island trajectory arrested. Real-world tectonic impact successfully prevented."

"Good," Levi wheezed, staring up at the blood-red sky.

Before he could even sit up, the system interface completely lost its mind. Blinding golden text flooded his vision, accompanied by the blaring sound of server-wide trumpets.

A dense, aggressively thick crimson aura ripped out of the empty air where Garuda had just been standing. It shot across the nest and violently slammed into Levi’s chest.

[Supreme Harvester triggered.]

[Garuda, the Sky-Tyrant’s primary stats are immense.]

[You have plundered a fraction of its core entity.]

[Gained +100 to ALL STATS permanently!]

Levi physically gasped as the raw data injected into his avatar. Plus one hundred to every single base stat. It was absolutely ridiculous. His virtual muscles felt completely completely supercharged.

A split second later, the experience points processed.

[System Notification: Slain Level 85 World Boss Garuda. Gained 800,000,000 XP.]

[Total XP Gained: 800,000,000.]

The golden pillar of progression light crashed down from the sky three times in rapid succession, a strobe light of absolute power.

[System Notification: Level Up! You are now Level 63.]

[System Notification: Level Up! You are now Level 64.]

[System Notification: Level Up! You are now Level 65.]

All the fatigue in his real-world muscles instantly evaporated. The pain in his chest vanished. His Shared HP and mana pools snapped to perfectly full.

He sat up and swiped his menu open. The 800 million XP easily paid the costs for all three levels, leaving him with exactly 40,000,000 XP carrying over into his next bar. He needed 320,000,000 XP to hit Level 66.