Three seconds and Yuan moved.
Shadow Step took him left, away from the exposed column, into the thicker dust cloud rolling off the ceiling collapse. He covered twelve meters before the skill dropped him back into corporeality, crouching behind an overturned examination table that two students had been using as a barricade.
The dust was still settling. The sight lines hadn't fully cleared.
He pressed his back against the table and took stock. MP was at sixty percent, the level-up to Shadow Step proficiency had quietly bumped his total pool alongside the skill improvement, a detail he'd noticed mid-fight and filed. His left arm had stiffened up from the earlier wound but the bleeding had stopped and the range of motion was acceptable. The stone shard was still in his right hand, edges worn from gripping it but functional.
From somewhere in the dust cloud ahead, the Gargoyle King was moving. He could track it by sound now, the specific grinding weight of calcified stone-hide against dungeon tile, the irregular rhythm of its compromised left knee. Slower than its entrance. Still dangerous in the particular way that wounded things with no retreat instinct were dangerous.
He heard the fire-affinity girl's voice again, closer than before. "—I'm telling you, I saw someone—"
"Focus." Li Meilin, flat and immediate.
The dust cleared.
Yuan was in a different position than the column. Different silhouette, different location. Li Meilin's gaze swept the hall in a fast professional arc and didn't stop on him. He watched her eyes move past the table he was behind and felt something between relief and a peculiar disappointment he didn't examine.
Then the Gargoyle King came out of the dust cloud and the room reorganized itself around that fact.
The ceiling collapse had done something useful, unintentionally.
The debris field now covered the central third of the hall floor, uneven ground, variable height, the kind of terrain that punished anything relying on mass and momentum and rewarded anything built around mobility. The Gargoyle King was neither nimble nor unbothered by the uneven surface. Its left knee was tracking six inches shorter on every stride, the cold damage from the fire girl's drill having stiffened the joint into something closer to a hinge than a ball socket.
Yuan watched it navigate the debris toward Li Meilin and made a decision.
The stealth framework was finished. The column was gone, the dust was settling, and the fire-affinity girl had already flagged his presence to the most perceptive person in the room. Trying to maintain full invisibility now was resource expenditure with declining returns.
What he had instead was speed, angles, and a monster that was already compromised in the specific places he knew how to hit.
He came out from behind the table.
Not e wasn't going to close forty meters on a C+ boss across rubble on foot without getting hit before he arrived. He waited for the Gargoyle King to commit its weight forward on the next stride, watched the left knee take the load and hesitate with it, and then activated Shadow Step.
Hidden Blade
He arrived at the creature's right side, below the arm, inside its guard.
The stone shard went into the shoulder joint crack, the one Li Meilin had opened with the first ice spike, and he drove it with everything the Agility bump had given his wrist and forearm. Not a slash. A push, concentrated, all the force in a single centimeter of contact.
The crack propagated.
[Ding!]
[Critical Hit! Gargoyle King's right shoulder joint damaged.]
The Gargoyle King's arm dropped six inches involuntarily, the joint compromised past the threshold of natural compensation. It made the millstone sound. Yuan was already gone.
He found a rhythm.
Shadow Step in, one strike, Shadow Step out. Never the same approach vector twice. Never lingering past the three-second window. The nine-and-a-half-second cooldown was the constraint he built everything around, during each recovery window he repositioned, read the next opening, let Li Meilin and the others cycle their own attacks while the creature's attention fragmented between multiple threats it couldn't consolidate.
The right knee on the third pass. The chest crack on the fifth. On the sixth, he misjudged the exit angle and the Gargoyle King's backswing came within a half-meter of his shoulder, the displaced air hitting him hard enough to stagger his landing.
Battle Instinct had flagged it 0.3 seconds early. That was the only reason he'd had time to angle away.
He filed it. Tightened the exit vectors on subsequent passes.
Li Meilin had noticed.
He could tell without looking directly at her, it was in the way she was moving, the slight reorientation of her attack sequencing. She'd started timing her heaviest formations to land *after* Yuan's strikes, using the Gargoyle King's reactive flinch to get ice into freshly stressed points before the creature's attention had fully returned. She wasn't coordinating with him consciously. She was reading the pattern and slotting herself into it because that was what her level of tactical processing did automatically.
It was, objectively, impressive.
It was also making both of them significantly more effective than either would have been operating independently, which Yuan chose not to feel anything complicated about.
[Ding!]
[Gargoyle King's movement speed reduced by 10%.]
[Ding!]
[Critical Hit! Gargoyle King's right knee joint damaged.]
The right knee went properly on the eighth pass, the stone shard into the joint line, and then his heel driven down onto the impact point as he pushed off for the exit, the additional force translating through the crack into the connective structure underneath. The Gargoyle King's right leg buckled. One knee on the floor, the debris field, the specific grinding sound of something very large and very heavy meeting stone involuntarily.
A sound went through the hall. Not a cheer, not organized enough for that, but a collective inhale that reversed, a room full of people discovering they still had breath to release.
Li Meilin hit the chest crack with a formation three times the size of anything she'd thrown in the previous five minutes.
The crack split to eight centimeters.
The Gargoyle King was not finished.
Yuan understood this intellectually and he understood it in his feet, which were telling him to stop closing distance, and he overruled both of them because the head was right there.
One knee down, right shoulder compromised, right leg at sixty percent. The head was tracking left toward Li Meilin, the bigger assessed threat, which meant the right side of the skull, where the brow ridge had deflected her first ice spike, was angled away from him and the temple was exposed.
High-frequency vibrations. Concentrated piercing.
He didn't have a weapon designed for either. He had a stone shard, worn down to a decent point, and the Agility of someone who'd been rewritten by a C-rank skill and a passive combat instinct.
He activated Shadow Step.
The three seconds of intangibility carried him up and left, using a debris chunk as a launch point, the trajectory putting him above and behind the Gargoyle King's right temple on an intercept arc. He had the shard reversed in his grip, point-first, both hands on it. The math said the momentum plus the point concentration was enough to push through the temple calcification if he hit the right angle.
The math was probably right. He was fairly confident in the math.
Then the Gargoyle King moved.
Not toward Li Meilin. Not toward the students. Toward nothing, inward, a full-body contraction, every remaining muscle group firing simultaneously. Yuan was mid-arc and had no surface to push off and the spatial distortion hit him before he processed what was happening.
The Gargoyle King was expanding.
The contraction was a prelude. The hide across its back and shoulders was splitting along stress lines, not damage, intentional, the calcified plates cracking outward in a radial burst, and the pressure wave that preceded it arrived while Yuan was still in the air with absolutely nowhere to go.
[Ding!]
[Gargoyle King: Desperate Counter — Stone Burst activated]