Inside was a throne room made of gold and silver.
And the Fairy King waited.
Oberon towered above his throne. He was a giant humanoid, his muscles like coiled steel and his skin as black as polished obsidian. His face was monstrous and was also almost human. Almost. A single eye, wide and glowing like a dying star, stared us down. It didn't blink. Just watched. As if it already knew how we'd die.
The air changed the moment we stepped forward. He only moved his eye. But the pressure hit us like gravity doubled.
Oberon's wings stretched out behind him, broad, veined, and gleaming like the wings of a Dysphania palmyra moth, beautiful in a way that made your skin crawl. Iridescent and deadly.
Oberon let out a nasty grin at us.
Tension crackled. My heartbeat slowed.
A system window appeared over Oberon's head:
[DUNGEON BOSS]: [FAIRY KING OBERON] — (LEVEL 100)
The battle began.
Oberon roared, wings unfolding as he lifted off the ground. His massive form shadowed the battlefield as he circled above, eyes glowing. From his mouth, a beam of searing red energy shot forward, carving through players like a scythe. Some screamed as the laser struck, their bodies shattering into fragments.
Archers and mages scrambled, launching volleys of arrows and spells toward him, but he twisted his body midair, dodging effortlessly, then slammed down with his claws. The impact sent players flying across the ground.
I ducked under a slash of his claws and rolling to the side. A female healer in white robes activated a protective barrier around me, just in time to block a follow up attack from Oberon: a blast of fire that splintered the ground.
"T-Thanks!" I said, rolling behind a giant slab of stone that fell from the ceiling.
The female healer in white robes nodded.
"I got you!" she said.
A Cryomancer shouted near me, activated a skill: Icy Trap. It froze the ground beneath Oberon's landing spot, slowing him down for a moment. Even then, his roar shook the air, and more laser beams speared toward us like deadly lightning.
One unlucky player, a high-level archer, tried to shoot him from a distance—Oberon dodged midair, avoiding the arrows, then let loose another laser. The archer got hit, shattering into fragments.
The players ran across the room, dodging lasers, screaming in panic.
"RUNNN!!!"
"I-IM OUT OF HP POTION, I'M GONNA DIE!!!"
"SOMEONE HELP!!!"
The remaining mages shouted and cast spells in unison, trying to stagger Oberon. Ice chains, fireballs, and bolts of lightning rained down on his massive body, but each strike seemed to barely scratch him.
Oberon rose above, flapping his massive wings. His glowing eyes locked on the remaining mages. From his mouth, a searing red beam pierced through the air, hitting them and shattering them into fragments.
Oberon roared, diving down to strike Leon and Adam. A violet laser shot from its massive eye, slicing the air toward them.
Adam reacted instantly, activating a skill: Retaliation. His lance glowed with energy as he hurled it straight into the violet beam. The collision erupted in sparks, nullifying the attack and slamming the spear into Oberon's body.
Leon leapt, activating a skill: Soul Cleave. Black crescent waves sliced through the air as his sword swung, striking Oberon midair and applying a debuff: Paralysis.
As Oberon fell from above, Claire followed up an attack, shouting, "Here's more!" She activated a skill: Pure Love, conjuring a huge pink beam that slammed into Oberon as it hit the wall. Dust and debris exploded in every direction, cloaking Oberon in a thick smoke of dust.
I seized the moment. I threw my spirit dagger at Oberon's body and activated its skill: Ownership. I reappeared to my dagger's location, holding its hilt.
"I'm sure that I'll be able to deal some damage toward this monster despite the level gap," I muttered, preparing to strike Oberon's body that was covered with smoke of dust.
"Hey! Watch out!" Claire's voice snapped me out of my focus, panic filling her tone.
"Take this—" I shouted, slamming my dagger into Oberon's body, but my words put to a stop as the smoke of dust cleared just enough to reveal Oberon's enormous, dilated eye, fixed directly on me.
Before I could react further, its jaws opened wide, and flames began to gather inside. Heat radiated toward me.
"Holy shit…" I whispered, my body trembling.
I activated my dagger's skill: Intangibility. My body flickered and phased just as the flames erupted, the heat rushing past me without leaving a mark.
When my dagger's skill faded, I was already sprinting behind a fallen giant stone of slab from the ceiling. I pressed my back against the cold surface, trying to calm my ragged breathing.
"I almost died there…" I thought, resting my head against the stone. "I'm not doing that shit again. EVER."
"He survived?" Claire muttered in disbelief. "But how?"
Finally, after what felt like an eternity of battle, Oberon's health dropped to thirty percent.
"What a fucking monster, wiping out two hundred ninety-six players…" I muttered, still hiding behind a giant slab of stone, panting, sweat dripping into my eyes. "And I'm running out of HP potions, damn it..."
Adam raised his lance, activating a skill: Banner of War. A crimson aura enveloped them. Their attack damage spiked.
Oberon roared as he braced to fly.
"Time to clip those wings," Leon said as he activated a skill: Soul Chain. Dark chains surged from his blade, striking Oberon and grounding him, preventing any aerial escape.
Oberon activated a skill: Nature's Barrier, allowing him to block a single attack.
As Oberon tried to activate a healing skill, Claire stepped forward, pulsating with pink radiant light.
"Time to shine, baby!" she said, activating a skill: Pure Love. A massive pink beam shot forth from her palm, piercing Oberon's barrier and disrupting his attempt to regenerate.
Oberon's health plummeted to twenty percent.
I exhaled slowly, glancing at Leon, Adam, and Claire as they regrouped after attacking.
"So… that's what a party of world-ranked players can do against a dungeon boss, huh?" I muttered, my voice a mix of awe and disbelief.
"I'm gonna go for the final blow with a kiss," Claire smirked, charging towards Oberon with haste, activating a skill: Pure Love. "Y'all have my back, right?"
I sighed. "How greedy..."
"Claire, get back!" Adam shouted. Then he activated a skill: Banner of Defense. A green aura enveloped them. Their magic and physical defense spiked.
"Claire, listen to me!" Adam shouted once more. "Something's not right!"
"Go for it, Claire," Leon said. Then he activated a skill: Soul Chain. "I'll make the fairy king unable to fly. You'll be safe!"
"Leon!" Adam yelled at Leon.
"What?" Claire can finish that thing easily," Leon replied.
Claire's attack struck Oberon, enveloping the area in dust.
"I got him!" Claire shouted in joy. "Yay!"
As the dust in the area settled, Oberon's form darkened, his wings expanding. From his wings, sharp seeds erupted, flying like jagged arrows straight at Claire. They plunged into her stomach with sickening thuds, embedding deep beneath her skin.
Then, Oberon fell to the ground again. We deemed it dead.
"CLAIRE!" Adam shouted. "ARE YOU ALRIGHT?!"
"The attack hit me, but it didn't do any damage," Claire said, looking at her stomach. "I'm a world-ranked player after all. This is nothing."
I stepped away from the giant stone slab where I had been hiding, letting my legs adjust to the movement. "Is it over?" I asked, my voice small but steady.
Adam's eyes narrowed as he glanced at me. "You were hiding all this time?" he said, shaking his head. "What a coward."
"I'm sorry," I replied. "My legs didn't move even though I forced it to..."
"You can't really blame him," Leon said, his tone calm. "He's probably a low-level player. Survival comes first."
"Whatever," Adam said. "The fight is already over."
Claire's expression softened, and she let out a faint smile. "Oh… the kid's alive! That's a good thing," she said, relief tinting her voice.
I nodded, trying to push down the lingering fear and exhaustion. "Yeah… still breathing," I muttered, more to myself than anyone else.
But then, Oberon suddenly slowly stood, his form became bigger.
A system window appeared above Oberon's head:
[FAIRY KING OBERON IS ENRAGED!]
"Enraged," I thought. "Just like the Leviathan Hermit..."
"It's not dead yet?" Adam said.
Oberon's voice rolled out, heavy and cruel, echoing off the stone like a funeral bell.
"Bloom and rejoice. For you have been reborn as a child of Mother Nature."
Claire looked down at her stomach. "Huh? what does that mean?" she said.
Something was wrong.
Claire's hands trembled as she stared at her stomach, eyes widening. The skin there… it shifted. Subtly at first, like the twitch of a muscle under strain. Then—A slither. A bulge. Something inside her was moving, writhing, pressing outward.
"Uhm, guys... I'm getting a funny feeling inside my body," Claire said, trying to sound calm, but her voice cracked halfway through.
Claire let out a scream. It didn't even sound human—it was high and scraping, like a metal fork dragged across a porcelain plate. Her back arched as her mouth opened wide, eyes blown with terror.
My eyes widened. "What the fuck is happening to her…" I muttered.
Then, from deep within Claire's chest, a monstrous flower erupted with brutal force, swelling grotesquely to the size of a car. Petals, thick as blades and wet with black sap, unfolded one by one, forcing her ribs apart. And it kept blooming. Spreading. Growing.
Claire kept screaming until her voice was gone. Until there was nothing left of her but the flower.
My eyes widened, jaw dropped. "Shit!" I yelled. "Shit! Shit! Shit!"
"CLAIRE!!!" Adam and Leon's screams collided, filled with horror and disbelief.
"You do not make noise in front of the king!" Oberon roared, activating a skill: Nature's Wrath.
Scarlet thorns erupted from the floor, impaling Adam, who got caught off guard.
And just like that, Adam was killed in an instant.
"Punishment for those who are not obedient," Oberon said, grinning nastily at us.
The same attack nearly got me and Leon, but I used my spirit dagger's skill just in time, and Leon activated a skill: Death Shroud, which turned him into a fog of black smoke, granting him a brief moment of invincibility.
"Hey, kid," Leon said. "Let's end this before this monster ends us."
"You're level seventy-one, right?" he asked. "We should be able to kill this monster in one blow if we caught it off-guard."
"Yeah..." I replied, gripping my dagger tightly. "Oberon's health points is at fifteen percent now. We should be able to kill him in one blow."
"Wait, how did you know?" I said, raising an eyebrow.
"Player inspect," he said. "Everyone has that, did you not know?"
"Oh..." I said. "I forgot about it."
"Now let's do this!" we said in unison, gripping our weapon tightly.
"Die, Intruders!" Oberon shrieked, launching massive stone shards toward us. "For you were not invited but still came!"
Leon raised his divine shield: Medusa. Then he activated its skill: Medusa's Gaze. "Seize your eyes, Fairy King Oberon," he said as the shield reflected the shards right back.
Oberon blocked the reflected attack with a leaf-like barrier, and activated a skill: Tree of Life, summoning a giant plant that produced a shiny droplet of water, healing some of his lost health points.
"His HP came back to twenty percent..." Leon said, trembling. "And I'm running out of mana... Do you think we can make it alive, Kid?"
"Definitely. Oberon got hurt so bad when I struck him earlier physically," I replied. "I think physical attacks are more effective against him. Try using soul chain, and let's charge at him together with all we've got."
Leon's eyes widened, pupils dilating like he'd just seen a ghost. His expression faltered, mind sinking into memory, like he was reliving something only he and a handful of survivors had ever seen and lived to speak about.
And then it hit him. A flashback.
The fifth dungeon, Volcanica.
They were buried deep inside the dungeon's molten core, where every breath tasted like burnt iron and ash. The air hung heavy, thick with the choking stench of scorched copper and brittle bone dust that scraped raw at their throats. The jagged obsidian walls pulsed with a slow, menacing heartbeat, a faint, blood-red glow that seemed alive, exhaling heat and whispers of fire through fractures that spiderwebbed like veins across the cavern. Beneath cracked stone platforms, pools of molten rock churned and hissed, bubbling like the earth's own boiling blood. Each step they took felt like dragging their souls across a searing grate, painful, relentless, and impossible to ignore.
At the center, the dungeon boss, Helios, the Sun Devourer, Spawn of Ash, erupted with a deafening roar that shook the very bones of the chamber. His four massive wings, forged from molten light, tore through the stone ceiling like burning blades, shattering it to reveal a fiery sky that churned and flickered with the fury of a dying star.
Around them, chaos reigned. Nearly a hundred players fought for survival amid the hellish heat. The air was thick with desperation. Healers collapsed in gasping, broken heaps, their skin clammy and slick from sweat, unable to stem the relentless burn stacks that seared flesh like acid. Warriors sweltered in armor that felt more like a furnace, metal scorching hot against cracking skin beneath. Mages, faces contorted in pain, were cut down mid-spell by flaming javelins that screamed through the air like vengeful meteors. Assassins, silent and deadly, were mostly fallen ghosts flickering out in the inferno.
After an hour of battle, twenty remained out of ninety players. And Helios was on twenty percent hp.
Leon was down on one knee, his body slick with sweat and dirt. His halberd burned red-hot in his grasp, the heat pulsing through his fingers like live wire. A metal shield he wielded was cracked from edge to core, spiderweb fractures marring its surface, the weight of absorbing too many flame pillars etched in every splintered line. His health bar blinked on the brink, a threadbare whisper of life clinging stubbornly. His MP was empty, evaporated into the suffocating heat and endless fight. Every inhale tasted like ash; every heartbeat thundered like a war drum in his ears.
Helios rose into the air above the altar, his wings forming a burning sigil in the sky, activating a skill: Total Destruction. A single fireball, massive and pulsing with black-violet energy, spiraled down toward the remaining players like divine punishment. Leon didn't run due to shock. He accepted that there was nowhere to go. And just before impact, the meteor split in half. Not shattered. Sliced. Clean. Precise. It broke apart midair.
And through the storm of dust and fire...
A woman walked.
Her face was never seen, hidden beneath a moss-colored veil that trailed behind her like vines caught in a hurricane. She had hair that flowed like a living cascade of the earth, loam brown, lichen green, and riverstone black, shot through with flickers of silver like starlight trapped in roots. In her hand, she held a divine weapon called Oceania. Its hilt was black stone embedded with three azure gems, each pulsing like a heartbeat, and its blade resembled a flowing wave, translucent, endless, and alive, held in a frozen arc that was always moving yet never spilling.
And then came the system ping, projecting across the dungeon:
[WORLD RANK PLAYER DETECTED]:
[Player 3]: [Isola Ashur] — (Level 80) — [World Rank 2]
Leon's eyes widened. "W–World Rank 2?" he stuttered.
A beat of silence passed.
Then the remaining players shouted. Their faces lit up.
"NO. FUCKING. WAY."
"Dude—DUDE! It's the real world rank 2 player we've seen from the leaderboards in the game when we were still playing as gamers! WE'RE SAVED!"
"THE WORLD RANK 2 PLAYER IN FLESH! SHE WAS A RAID BOSS BACK THEN!"
A roar of voices tore through the battlefield like crashing thunder. Ragged cheers, shaky laughter, and even tears breaking free. One archer, his leg burned raw and crawling on scorched earth, dropped to his knees and kissed the ground as if it were a sacred promise. Nearby, two healers clung to each other, their shoulders shaking with quiet sobs.
An injured warrior coughed and slumped backward against a broken stone, his voice barely a whisper, "Thank God..."
Then she moved.
Helios roared, fury igniting the air as he unleashed twelve blazing spears of fire. The heat warped the space between them, thickening the air until it shimmered like a mirage.
But she was gone. No shadow. No form.
She flowed through the battlefield like water, slipping past flames and steel with liquid grace, and blinked forward, gliding through the air as if carried by an invisible current, bending around fire and heat like a cool stream cutting through molten rock. The blade in her hand gleamed with a shimmering blue light, alive and flowing like a river. Soft, powerful, and unstoppable. Then she reappeared before the boss. Her movements were smooth and fluid, impossible to hold or catch, like water slipping through clenched fists.
She vanished again.
Only a whisper of a cut remained. Sharp. Clean. Like a rushing stream carving stone.
Her blade sank deep into Helios' armored chest, slicing through as if it were nothing but soft moss.
The fiery roar faltered, caught in the sudden stillness.
Then came the system message in gold:
[FIFTH DUNGEON]: [CLEARED]
"Leon! HEY!" Leon snapped back to reality as my voice entered his ears. "This is not the right time to space out."
Leon nodded. "My sincerest apologies," he said. "Now, let's get back to business."
"Such assumptions, mortals, you think I'm inferior to physical attacks?" Oberon sneered, launching a sky beam from his mouth. "A king does not have a weakness!"
Leon activated his divine shield's ability, blocking and reflecting Oberon's attack. As it hit Oberon, Leon activated a skill: Soul Chain to paralyze him.
"Now, Kiddo!" Leon shouted. "Finish that stinking moth!"
Without hesitation, I lunged at Oberon. "THIS IS IT!" I thought. "THIS IS THE OPENING I NEEDED!"
But Oberon anticipated the move, releasing a shockwave that sent me flying into a wall. It felt like my spine was broken. My health points plummeted to twenty, and darkness edged my vision.
A system window appeared in front of me:
[WARNING]: [LOW HP!]
I heard Leon's fading voice. "Kiddo!"
Leon made me drink a greater HP potion. "Don't you die on me, Kiddo. We're clearing this shit together."
I coughed, my health points back to a hundred. "One more time..." I said, slowly getting on my knees. "One last fucking time."
"I have to use it this time..." Leon thought. "I need to!"
Oberon activated a skill: Tree of Life to heal himself again as the Soul Chain effect wore off. But before the droplet reached his head, a crimson slash hit him, interrupting the healing process.
A system window appeared over the dungeon boss's head:
[FAIRY KING OBERON'S HP]: [5%]
I turned to see Leon holding a crimson longsword with a mouth-shaped handle that sucked blood from his arm. It was his secret unique weapon: Bloodthirsty Sword. The sword drains fifty percent of the user's health points to conjure an attack equivalent to the lost health points, with a bonus random effect.
Leon, on his knees with minimal health, shouted, "THAT INSECT WON'T BE ABLE TO MOVE FOR A FEW MOMENTS, KIDDO. A RANDOM EFFECT IS CURRENTLY APPLIED TO IT, AND I'M PRETTY SURE IT'S A STUN EFFECT SINCE IT'S ON ITS KNEES. EXTERMINATE IT NOW!"
My eyes locked onto the stunned Oberon, and I sprinted towards him, gripping my dagger tightly. It was a gamble. No one knew what bonus effect was applied. Stun effect or not, I was going for the kill. I kept my spirit dagger's activation at bay to avoid repeating past mistakes.
As I came near Oberon, I realized he couldn't move or use skills. He wasn't stunned.
A system window appeared above his head:
[Fairy King Oberon] - [Immobilized]
"Immobilized… How unlucky for the fairy king," I thought. "I'll try copying that girl's ability. Maybe it'll work this time. The boss is already as good as dead anyway."
I leapt into the air, hand raised. "Copy skill: Pure Love."
A system window appeared:
[New Skill Detected]: [Pure Love]
[Copy Skill?]: [Y/N]
"Yes," I pressed, calm and composed, and a bit of excitement. "Copy!"
[Skill Copied]: [Pure Love]
[ATTACK CHOICES]:
[Quick Burst Damage]: [Y/N]
[Full Burst Damage]: [Y/N]
I chose the first option to avoid a long casting time that could leave me vulnerable.
"WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?!" Leon's voice rang out as a surge of pink magic energy flowed through my body.
"That move," Leon muttered, panting heavily. "It can't be... It's Claire's…"
I aimed my right hand at Oberon.
"Fairy King..." I muttered. "Exterminated."
A massive pink beam erupted from my palm, slicing the air like a pure blade of light. The immobilized fairy king could only widen his eyes as the attack struck him, erasing his existence from reality.
"This kid is something else…" Leon thought, his eyes in shock. "He might become a potential candidate…"
Then came the system message in gold:
[DUNGEON CLEARED: TREASURE ROOM UNLOCKED]