The cave did not warn them with sound.
It warned them with eyes.
At first, Alex thought they were reflections. Pale wet circles in the dark above the altar, catching the silver fall of cave water and throwing it back wrong. Then the circles moved.
A pair of eyes detached itself from the ceiling.
They descended on slick cords of muscle and translucent tendon like fruit falling from a diseased tree, turning as they came, both of them far too large, bloodshot, and alive. There was no face attached. Just two floating eyeballs, veined and frantic, wriggling in the air with the obscene determination of parasites returning home.
They shrieked.
The sound was thin, high, and hateful enough to lance through the chamber. Team Nemean's instincts all snapped tight at once.
Then the eyes dove behind the altar.
The stone hill shook.
Something rose from behind the blood-dark sacrificial table, and in one impossible motion what had seemed at first like only a large shape became a giant.
It stood ten meters tall when fully uncoiled, black fur hanging off its frame in damp mats. Its body was thick in the chest and shoulders like a troll or ape, yet wrong in every proportion, its back hunched beneath a ridge of old scars and knotted muscle. A single horn curved from the center of its brow. Boar-tusks jutted up from the sides of its mouth. The hands—if they could still be called hands—ended in long hooked nails like butcher knives grown from bone.
Its face was the worst part.
The eye sockets were still empty when it rose.
The pair of eyes came writhing up from behind the altar, each one trailing a string of glistening sinew, and began crawling into those sockets like worms forcing themselves into wounds that had been waiting for them.
They had not even settled fully into place when the creature roared.
And in the same movement it seized the white vajra from the altar.
The relic woke in its grip.
Lightning burst from the tooth-weapon with such violence that the whole chamber became white.
A furrow of raw electricity ploughed through the lush cave, vaporizing moss, exploding stone, boiling the surface of the pond into instant steam. The skeleton-ring around the hill flashed in the light like a crowd of witnesses cheering at a sacrifice.
Dominic moved first.
He had no time to think. Eyeless Heaven came up by reflex, all shield and stubbornness, and he threw himself into the line of the attack to buy the others a breath.
Lightning hit relic.
The impact sounded like judgment.
Dominic was ripped off his feet and hurled backward. He smashed into the side of the cave hard enough to crack the stone and collapse to one knee, then to one hand, groaning. The opening he made lasted only a second, but it was enough.
The team scattered.
Alex rolled behind a low black rock formation on the left. Jake and Joanne dove right. Séline and Camille split cleanly around the central lane. Jack dragged Janet with him behind a column of obsidian that had once been part of the cave wall. Alexei planted himself between Emma and the open line until they found harder cover.
Steam hissed across the chamber. Pebbles rained. The giant stepped down from the hilltop altar with the vajra in hand, and now the eyes had fully seated themselves in its sockets.
Emma leaned out just enough to appraise.
Her pupils widened.
"Yeak," she said sharply. "Level 62. Boss entity."
That number hit all of them harder than the lightning had.
Level 62.
The second threshold.
The second evolution.
They had beaten level fifty threats with relics, teamwork, absurdness, and overdrive fruit. But 60 was something else. Back then, when the Black Ant Queen showed itself, they couldn't even muster a thought of fighting back. Back then, face to face with a level 82 Cà Rồng, a doubled stats Alex was swatted away like a fly.
The Yeak proved it immediately.
It inhaled. Then from it mouth came waves after waves of fire. A furnace-blast that rolled low and wide, hot enough to blacken the cave ceiling and crack the polished stone beneath it. Alex answered with Bai Hu's storm, the wind deflecting the worst of it upward while Joanne's elemental bullets cut through the edge of the flame. The chamber still became an oven for a heartbeat.
Then the fire cut off and frost came instead.
A breath of white death swept over the same ground the fire had just claimed, flash-freezing puddles, moss, and half-melted stone into brittle ruin.
"Wonderful," Jake muttered. "It does seasons too."
The Yeak moved.
At ten meters, it should have been too big to accelerate well.
It wasn't.
One instant it loomed near the altar. The next it had shrunk, bones and flesh compressing inward in a sickening ripple until it was only man-sized—still massive, still furred and tusked, but small enough to move with murderous speed.
It charged.
Alex met it with a barrage of spinning shield from Bai Hu's storm. The condensed marbles smashed into its chest, shoulder, and jaw hard enough to pulp cockroaches and punch roaches open like overripe fruit. The shields came lower, and slam into the creature's leg. The Yeak grunted, staggered once—
—and kept coming.
It felt the pain, and that made it worse.
The Arbiter Mindblade pressure hurt it. They could all see that. The giant's lip peeled back. The parasitic eyes twitched in their sockets. But level 62 give it an edge sharp enough to push through the pain Alex inflicted.
Alex avoided the first slash by a hand's breadth. The hooked nails carved a chunk out of the obsidian behind her instead. She answered with a telekinetic burst of speed, circled, and drove a psychic spear into the Yeak's side. The construct shattered on impact like glass driven into old oak.
Jack cursed from behind cover.
"Fuck you! Why won't you listen? Move!"
His Stone Lord control skidded over the black ground and found little purchase. The obsidian remained stubbornly uncooperative, as if even at level forty-one it still rejected the idea of being commanded by human-shaped will.
"Just have to make do then!" Dominic barked, still pushing himself back upright.
They did.
That was what Team Nemean had become good at—making do in bad places against things stronger than them.
Séline, Jake and Camille worked in tandem, the French duo and 2 daggers with mouth assuming the tri-point attack. Séline's elemental fists hammered the joints. Camille's poisoned blades sought fur-thin gaps and tendon lines. Jake slipped to the Yeak's behind, slashing at its back tendons. Alexei held center where he could, shield drinking impacts while Emma's voice and buffs tightened the team's rhythm.
Joanne's revolver sang, elemental rounds striking the parasitic eyes whenever they opened too wide in a roar. Janet kept morale and command timing from fraying under the boss pressure. Even battered, Dominic returned to the line with Eyeless Heaven high, drawing most of the pressure that his teammate could not handle.
Still, the Yeak was too much.
Every clean hit they landed looked meaningful right until the creature rose through it. Its body could expand back to giant size to tank wider exchanges and then shrink again to lunge with startling speed. The vajra in its hand added too much range and too much elemental tyranny to any opening they managed to create. When Dominic forced it back, the Yeak answered with thunder. When Alex got the storm around it, it exhaled fire or frost and broke her rhythm with environmental violence.
Level fifty bosses would have started yielding by now.
This thing did not.
The realization settled over the team in stages. They had used everything. Skills, relics, tactics, none of it work. Maybe a copy of the Nine would be enough to bring the boss to its knees, but they weren't Kaiser, Yue Ting or Vân. They were not that lucky.
Joanne made the decision first.
She had already been grimly measuring the fight in the same way Phong did when all comfortable options were dead. There was no room for "saving resources." Not against this. Not if they wanted to leave the cave with a relic and all their organs still their own.
"I'm going all in," she snapped.
"Joanne—" Emma started.
Too late.
Joanne had already bitten down on the Berserking Strawberry.
The fruit's sweetness flashed ugly across her face as the stat explosion took hold. At the same time she crushed a Typhoon Tomato into her mouth, swallowing the overdrive whole.
Double all stats for one minute, stacking on top of halving her mana cost and cooldown. The backlash would make Joanne more harmless than a cleaner fish. But right now, for this 1 single minute, Joanne was a goddess.
Emma cursed:
"I'm withdrawing the buffs."
People with less tanky classes like Joanne, Alex, and her wouldn't survive a Sword Maestro's buffs stacking on top of Berserking Strawberry. Not after Emma reached level 40 and all her buffs increased to 40%. Functioning at almost 3 times their normal stats would pop anyone aside from maybe Dominic like an over-pumped balloon.
Joanne had no time to answer that, as her body was lit from the inside.
The revolver rose.
And Joanne became a problem in so many different languages.
Spell bullets poured from her like a private war. Fire, lightning, force, piercing elemental shot—one after another after another until the cave was shaking beneath the repeated impacts. The Yeak actually recoiled. Black fur burned. Flesh split. One tusk cracked. The parasitic eyes shrieked as lightning rounds burst too close to them for comfort.
If Joanne had used this against Kenai on the surface, the last shot of that match would have torn through him and left the duel in murder territory even through the ring dampening effect.
Here, against a level sixty-two boss, it only finally made the Yeak look wounded.
That was enough to matter.
The giant roared, but Joanne was covered too well by the trio, Alex on the flank, and Dominic Eyeless Heaven. It stopped for one ugly, terrible moment, then it threw the vajra.
The moment it left the Yeak's hand, the relic vanished.
"Joanne!" Alex shouted.
Alexei moved before thought.
He was already between them when the vajra reappeared behind Joanne's line, white lightning wrapped around it like a halo of execution. It rushed toward Joanne's back, hitting Alexei's shield and body together.
The impact was catastrophic.
Alexei had eaten Stoic Garlic, enough to numb pain and steady mind through hits that would have folded weaker men. It did not save him from the crack that raced through his bones. He grunted, and dropped to a knee, shield still held purely thanks to principles.
The vajra, thwarted, tried to return to the Yeak's hand.
Jack, Séline, and Camille stopped it.
Jack threw himself over the relic, using his new terrain-reading gear to anchor himself against the impossible pull. Séline slammed both shield-gloves against the haft and fed mana through them until the air around her hands sparked. Camille drove a blade under one of the relic's prongs.
For three impossible seconds they held the Sky Emperor's tooth in place by teamwork, rage, and blasphemous courage alone.
Joanne released all 20 bullets in rapid succession, finally managed to stagger the boss.
Emma saw the opening.
She poured everything she had into Dominic.
All her buffs, all four swords, forty percent extra across 4 stats now riding into him at once.
Dominic took this chance to eat his Berserking Strawberry as well. The first lightning strike he had tanked at the start of the fight had maxed out his absorbed damage. Yet, he did not have a good angle to use God's Roar Cannon. The Yeak's ability to change its size at will make it too unpredictable. Now, under Emma's support, with the Yeak staggered and the relic momentarily held unusable by the others, he raised Eyeless Heaven and roared.
God's Roar Canon answered with the strongest blast he had ever produced.
The beam came out blue.
It wasn't the usual gold-white, or the old judgment light they knew. Blue, deep and strange, like it was fed too much wrath all at once. It tore across the cave and hit the Yeak center mass.
At the same time, something even stranger happened.
The eyes.
The things squirming in the Yeak's sockets screeched as if they were dipped in acid.
Eyeless Heaven lived up to its name in a way none of them had understood before. Whatever those parasites were, whatever old category of seeing and devouring they belonged to, the relic countered them. The blue flare of Dominic's attack made the eyes writhe and recoil in their sockets as if the shield had found the exact wrongness they embodied and answered it directly.
The Yeak stood in place, stunned with the parasitic eyes.
That was all Alex needed.
She ate a Berserking Strawberry too, gambling her own backlash against the necessity of ending this now. Her storm tightened. Two psychic marbles condensed beyond anything she had dared compress before. They felt like tungsten, dense, merciless, built to be used like wrecking balls more than projectiles.
She fired them straight into the eye sockets.
The first crushed the left parasite.
The second caved in the right.
There was a wet explosion of ichor, nerves, and shrieking meat. The Yeak's whole body seized. It swayed once, a giant whose eyes had been smashed in by thought made solid.
Then it fell.
It hit the stone hill below the altar so hard the pond rippled and skeletons slid from their old kneeling places.
And it did not rise again.
For one long second, no one moved.
Then every diver app in the world pinged.
Across the globe, phones, tablets, smart glasses, mana-adapted screens, and whatever new hybrid devices humanity had built to survive the dungeon all flashed with the same notification.
Congratulations to Team Nemean for slaying the legacy boss: Yeak of the Black Mountain.
In the cave, every member of Team Nemean looked up at once.
"Mr. Zero," Jake said flatly.
No one disagreed. It had his fingerprints all over it. Dramatic exposure. Global timing. The sort of chaotic little gift he would consider hilarious.
But the backlash had arrived.
Typhoon Tomato lockout crashed down.
Berserking Strawberry weakness tore through the body.
Joanne nearly dropped where she stood, limbs shaking from the violence of the crash.
Alex and Dominic backlash came later, but in no less violent. Alex swayed hard enough that the Raging Judgenaut, himself not in much better shape, had to catch her by the elbow.
Emma's mana was a scraped-empty ache. Alexei was white around the mouth from the damage under his Stoic Garlic. Jack, Séline, and Camille all let the vajra finally settle, too exhausted to be angry about cosmic public relations anymore.
So no one had the energy to be mad.
Not really.
They had killed a level sixty-two boss.
They had taken the vajra.
And the whole world now knew it.