The decision wasn't complicated.
Li Meilin was the most dangerous person in this dungeon right now, which made her the most useful person to be near. Yuan wasn't sentimental about it. She was a resource, a moving safe zone, a gravitational pull that other students would orient toward once they found her, a fixed point in a situation that had no fixed points.
He followed her at forty meters, staying in the peripheral dark, and told himself that was the only reason.
---
She moved fast for someone leading a group.
There were five of them total, Li Meilin at the front, four others trailing in a loose formation that she'd clearly arranged herself. Two E-ranks flanking, one carrying an injured classmate over his shoulders, one more at the rear trying to watch every direction simultaneously. They were holding together through sheer proximity to her, the same way a flame keeps things warm just by existing.
Yuan tracked them through Mana Sense and stayed out of it.
The first problem came at the T-junction past the dungeon's second chamber, a pair of C-rank Dire Wolves positioned in the left branch, flat against the wall, mana signatures deliberately compressed. Waiting. The kind of coordinated ambush positioning that suggested either pack intelligence or dungeon instinct sophisticated enough to approximate it.
Li Meilin's group was going left.
Yuan activated Shadow Step, looped wide through the right branch, and came around behind the wolves from the junction's blind corner. He hit the rear wolf across the back of the skull with a chunk of loose stone, hard enough that it yelped and spun, and the sound of the second wolf reacting to its packmate gave Li Meilin's group exactly the warning they needed.
By the time she'd wheeled and assessed the threat, both wolves had already turned toward the noise in the right branch. Yuan was gone. Shadow Step cooldown ticking down. He emerged from the dark thirty meters back and kept pace.
[Ding!]
[C-Rank Dire Wolf defeated]
[Experience +60]
He'd circled back during the fight and finished the rear wolf while Li Meilin handled the other. Clean. She hadn't seen him. The wolf had simply stopped moving.
She stood over it for a moment after, studying it with the focused expression of someone whose instincts were telling them something their eyes couldn't confirm.
"Lucky break," said one of the E-ranks.
Li Meilin said nothing. She filed it away and moved on.
---
Her combat style was ice.
Not ice in the simple sense or just frost and cold damage applied to targets. The way she used it was structural. She'd read a situation, identify the geometry of it, and then impose her own geometry on top. A Goblin Warrior charging from the right received a thin sheet of ice across the floor in its path, momentum converting from threat to liability in under a second. An Orc Shaman trying to build a mana charge in the corridor ahead got a spike of compressed cold through its concentration before the cast resolved, the ability collapsing inward.
Yuan, watching from forty meters back, felt the competitive spark he'd noticed at the crossroads flicker brighter.
He watched her work and his mind kept going to his status window, to the skills sitting in it, to the ones that didn't exist yet.
'What would it look like to solve things like that?'
He shelved it. Stayed focused.
The Orc Shaman had two bodyguards that Li Meilin's group hadn't seen, stationed in a side alcove, waiting on the Shaman's signal. Yuan caught their signatures with Mana Sense and sent a stone skipping across the alcove entrance before they could move. The sound drew their attention outward for three seconds. Three seconds was enough for Li Meilin to finish the Shaman and rotate.
She handled the bodyguards. He didn't need to.
[Ding!]
[Assisted in C-Rank Orc Shaman defeat]
[Experience +20]
The assisted notification was new. He hadn't seen that category before. The system was apparently tracking contribution even when he wasn't the one landing the killing blow, which opened up implications he didn't have time to think through properly.
He pulled an injured student out of a side corridor two minutes later, a girl who'd gotten separated, E-rank badge, leg wound that wasn't critical but had slowed her to a crawl. He found her by the mana signature, got a shoulder under her arm, and half-carried her to within sight of Li Meilin's group before Shadow Step put him back in the dark. She stumbled into the formation looking confused about how she'd gotten there.
Li Meilin caught her, steadied her, looked back at the corridor she'd come from.
Yuan was already twenty meters away, pressed into a shadow, breathing carefully.
He was getting better at it. That was the thing he kept noticing, the skill wasn't just static, it was responsive. The more he used it, the more the three-second window felt like enough time, the more the ten-second cooldown felt manageable rather than constraining. He wasn't sure if that was the Battle Instinct passive improving his read on timing, or something else. Maybe the system rewarded use. Maybe skills grew.
He added it to the list of things to figure out later. The list was getting long.
---
The main hall opened up like a held breath releasing.
Yuan hung back at the entrance corridor while Li Meilin's group crossed the threshold, watching the reaction ripple through the students already sheltered inside. Fifty, maybe sixty people, first and second years mostly, clustered in loose groups, the higher-ranked ones forming a rough perimeter while the lower-ranked ones stayed toward the center. Someone had found the hall's emergency mana lamps and activated them. The light was pale and flat and it made everyone look worse than they probably were.
Li Meilin walked in and the room's posture changed. Not dramatically, not a crowd erupting in relief, but there was a visible settling, the way people breathe out when something they were bracing for doesn't arrive. She moved through them toward the perimeter without stopping, assessing, already working.
Yuan found a column near the entrance and leaned against it.
His HP was back to roughly full. MP had recovered during the navigation, Shadow Step used less than he'd been spending in the early frantic minutes, now that he was using it deliberately instead of desperately. His Mana Sense had quieted to a manageable background read: fifty-odd student signatures inside the hall, a scattering of C-rank monster signals prowling the outer corridors at distance, nothing immediately incoming.
For the first time since the anomaly, the situation felt almost stable.
He was thinking about the word almost when the floor moved.
Not the vibration from before, that had been strange and internal, a spatial event announcing itself. This was physical. This was the stone under his feet shifting with the weight of something moving beneath it, or through it, or toward it from a direction that the dungeon's architecture hadn't previously contained.
The mana lamps flickered.
Every Mana Sense in the room, and there were only two, Yuan's and a second-year with a slightly higher-ranked version across the hall, would have spiked at the same moment. Yuan felt it like a wall. A single signature, enormous and consolidated, with the specific quality of mana that high-rank field guides described in careful, clinical language because the writers hadn't wanted to use the word wrong.
The roar arrived a half-second later, traveling through three corridors and two stone walls and still hitting the main hall like a physical impact. Someone dropped something metal. A first-year near the center of the room started crying.
Li Meilin turned from the perimeter to face the entrance corridor.
Her expression hadn't changed. Her eyes had.
Yuan looked at his status window without opening it, running the arithmetic in his head instead. C-rank skills, D-rank passive, F-rank base stats with small incremental bumps. And somewhere in the dungeon's lower levels, moving upward, something that made a C-rank Dire Wolf feel like the slime monsters they'd been clearing an hour ago.