The Gargoyle King's arm came down.
Yuan was already moving.
Shadow Step put him behind the creature in under two seconds, close enough to smell the dungeon-calcite of its hide, close enough to see the individual stress fractures in the stone plating along its spine. He didn't try to hit it. He kicked the largest piece of rubble near his feet as hard as he could into the back of the creature's left knee joint and then Shadow Step pulled him sideways into the dark before the motion finished.
The Gargoyle King's arm came down wrong.
The kick hadn't done damage, not even close, but the unexpected contact at the knee had produced a micro-adjustment, a half-degree rotation in the hips, and the Stone Fist that had been aimed at the clustered students near the left wall hit the floor instead. The impact was still catastrophic, stone tiles detonating outward in a radius, but the students were on their feet and running and the geometry of nearly hit was survivable in a way that directly hit was not.
Li Meilin was already capitalizing. She'd seen the stumble, or what looked like a stumble, and two ice formations were up before the dust cleared, both aimed at the joint Yuan had been near. Neither cracked the hide, but the cold penetrated, and the Gargoyle King's next step was fractionally slower on that side.
Yuan was thirty meters away and counting his cooldown.
Eight... Nine... Ten.
---
The pattern established itself quickly, which surprised him.
He'd expected to be improvising continuously, reactive, scrambling, one step behind the chaos. Instead, something settled after the first intervention. Maybe it was the Battle Instinct passive, running quietly underneath everything else, translating the combat information his Mana Sense was feeding him into something closer to prediction. Maybe it was simpler than that. Maybe he'd just stopped being scared enough to think straight.
Either way, he started reading the Gargoyle King's sequencing.
Stone Fist had a tell, a weight shift to the back foot, roughly 1.2 seconds before the arm extended. Roar of Intimidation required jaw extension, which exposed the underside of the neck for the half-second it took the anatomy to fully open. The creature's tracking was primarily visual, which meant misdirection worked better on it than it would have on something running scent or mana detection.
He started building on it.
The second intervention: Shadow Step to the creature's right flank, a sharp whistle, his own, no tools required, that snapped the Gargoyle King's attention right while Li Meilin was pressing from the left. The half-second of divided attention let her get an ice spike into the shoulder joint, the same one Yuan had identified from the column. This time it bit.
The crack that opened in the calcification was thin, a few millimeters, tracing the joint line, but it was there, and the Gargoyle King flinched.
Li Meilin saw it. Her head turned toward the impact point with the focus of someone filing information, and Yuan watched her recalibrate in real time. She'd found a viable target. She knew where to push now.
Good. That was the point.
Third intervention: the fire-affinity girl, he still didn't know her name, had been trying to contribute from range, sustained bursts that the hide was eating without complaint. Yuan materialized six meters to her left, scraped his boot loudly across the rubble to draw her attention, and pointed two fingers at the Gargoyle King's left knee, the cold-compromised one, the one that was already moving slightly wrong. Then Shadow Step took him back before she could fully process what she'd seen.
She stared at the space where he'd been. Then she looked at the knee.
The next burst she threw was a concentrated drill instead of a spread, everything compressed into a single piercing jet aimed at that specific joint.
The Gargoyle King made a sound that was different from its previous ones.
It was getting angry.
Yuan could tell not just from the increasing frequency of the roars, which were coming shorter and sharper now, less intimidation and more genuine frustration, but from the way it was moving. The deliberate, territorial patience from its entrance was gone. It was starting to overcorrect, swinging at spaces that had been occupied moments before, rotating too fast and compromising its own balance.
A creature built for dominance didn't know how to process a threat it couldn't locate.
He used Shadow Step to trip it. Properly, this time, materialized directly behind the right foot mid-step, got a shoulder into the ankle joint, disappeared before the weight came down. The Gargoyle King lurched forward, caught itself on one hand, and the students near the right wall had time to scatter before it pushed back upright.
The problem was the cooldown was ten seconds and the fight had been running for nearly four minutes and he was starting to feel the MP expenditure.
[Ding!]
[Shadow Step proficiency increased. Current Level 2.]
[Effect: Cooldown reduced by 0.5 seconds. Duration increased by 0.2 seconds.]
Nine-and-a-half seconds. Three-point-two seconds of intangibility.
He took a breath that was mostly relief.
The proficiency notification answered a question he'd been holding since the extraction. Skills can grow. They responded to number of time he uses. Which meant the current numbers weren't the ceiling, they were just the floor.
The Gargoyle King's hide was showing it now.
The shoulder joint crack had been joined by two others, one along the left knee from the fire girl's concentrated drilling, one across the upper chest from a combined ice and earth impact that Dao Fen had managed after his nervous system recovered enough to function. He was operating at maybe forty percent, but forty percent of an A-rank earth reinforcement build was still enough to matter at the right moment.
The creature's movements had slowed. Not dramatically, it was still the most dangerous thing in the room and everyone present understood that, but the calcified hide that had shrugged off their opening barrage was now a liability in places, the cracked sections catching and pulling at the joints underneath.
Li Meilin was relentless. She'd identified three viable target points and was rotating between them systematically, never letting any single one close up, her mana cycling so efficiently that Yuan couldn't detect any sign of fatigue in her output. She was burning through a C+ boss monster on technical precision alone.
He felt the competitive spark again, warmer this time. Less look at the gap and more I'm going to remember this.
The Gargoyle King stopped moving.
It stood in the center of the hall with three A-rank hunters applying sustained pressure from three angles and an unseen force that had been dismantling its positioning for four minutes, and it opened its jaw to the full anatomical extension, the tell that Yuan had clocked for Roar of Intimidation, and this time the sound it produced was different.
The ceiling answered.
The stress fractures that the Roar of Intimidation had opened in the stone above the hall earlier, the ones Yuan had noticed and filed as structural concern, low priority, propagated suddenly, and a section of ceiling three meters wide let go. The debris came down in chunks rather than a single collapse, which was the only mercy, but the distribution was wide and the column Yuan was positioned behind took a direct hit from something large enough to drive it six centimeters into the floor.
He pressed flat against it as a second impact hit the floor a meter to his left, close enough to pepper his jacket with fragments. His Mana Sense spiked with proximity warnings that arrived slightly after the physical evidence.
In the hall, the dust cloud from the collapse had spread across the central floor. He could hear students coughing. Li Meilin calling positions in a flat, carrying voice.
And from somewhere in the dust, the sound of the fire-affinity girl: "Did anyone else see, there was someone over there—"
Yuan looked at his column.
A chunk of fallen stone had exposed the recess where he was standing from two angles. The dust was settling and the mana lamps were still on.