The crippled Boulder-Back's rage became the environment. Its remaining fist, a monolithic hammer of granite, pounded the earth in blind, thunderous arcs. Each impact wasn't just a sound; it was a physical shockwave that tore through the petrified soil, hurling shards of fossilized wood and stone like shrapnel. The countdown mercilessly continued its descent.
25:45...
25:44...
Jade and Zero moved without speaking, their actions a conversation of violence written in motion and steel.
Jade became the agitator, a white-haired phantom in the dust-choked air. He didn't stand and trade blows. He flowed, his body remembering the grueling repetitions from the mindscape. As the Boulder-Back's fist slammed down where he'd stood a heartbeat before, Jade was already moving. He didn't retreat; he slid inside the arc of the follow-through, the dead zone of the colossal limb.
His scythe, the black star-iron blade humming with latent power, didn't rise for a killing blow. Instead, he dropped low, his body coiling like a spring. With a guttural shout, he unleashed the low, sweeping arc—the move drilled into him to shatter foundations. The blade didn't slice; it smashed into the side of the behemoth's remaining good knee.
The sound was a deafening CRACK-CRUNCH of shearing granite. A web of fractures exploded across the stone joint. The Boulder-Back bellowed, a sound of grinding continents, its colossal weight lurching dangerously. It was a foundational strike, not a fatal one. He was the distraction, the constant, infuriating source of pain and imbalance.
Zero was the silence within the storm. While Jade was a whirlwind, Zero was a statue. He stood his ground, feet rooted, not in the absolute defense of Chinmoku, but in a ready, predatory stillness. Dust and debris pattered harmlessly off the aura of focused calm around him. His silver-green eyes, sharpened by ten thousand battles, didn't track the flailing limbs or Jade's frantic movements. They were locked on the core of malevolent green energy pulsing erratically in the creature's chest, a frantic heartbeat of power. He was the scalpel waiting for the surgeon to create the incision.
The opportunity came. Enraged by the damage to its leg, the Boulder-Back focused entirely on Jade, ignoring the silent threat. It raised its good arm high for a final, crushing overhead slam, a blow that would turn the ground to powder. Its chest, the pulsing core, was fully exposed, unguarded.
In that suspended moment, as the massive shadow fell over him, Jade didn't dodge. He planted his feet, met the creature's burning gaze, and roared a challenge, buying that one last second of distraction.
Zero moved.
It was less a step and more a displacement of air. The foundational principles of Tenbatsu Ryūdan carried him across the shattered ground without a sound. Gesshilla left its sheath not with a shriek, but with a whisper of parting steel. He didn't leap or spin. He simply arrived, his body a perfectly aligned vector of force.
The blade didn't thrust at the core. It wasn't a physical attack. The tip of Gesshilla touched the empty air just before the pulsating green energy. Zero's entire being focused into a single, precise motion—a subtle, almost gentle cut that spoke not of destruction, but of unmaking.
The effect was instantaneous and absolute.
The tether of malevolent energy connecting the core to the stone body wasn't severed; it was edited out of existence. One moment, the green light throbbed with violent life. The next, it was simply gone. Not faded, not exploded. Erased.
The Boulder-Back's world-ending roar choked off into a strangled, grinding gurgle. The life animating the tons of granite and obsidian was switched off like a light. The massive arm, poised to crush Jade, froze mid-descent. The entire colossal form teetered for a heart-stopping moment, a mountain defying gravity, before collapsing inward upon itself. It fell not with a crash, but with a deep, grinding rumble, dissolving into an inert, crumbling mountain of useless rock.
Silence returned, heavier and more profound than before. The countdown read 24:18.
Jade stood panting, the dust settling around him like snow. He leaned heavily on his scythe, his chest heaving. Every muscle fiber in his shoulders and back screamed in protest, a real, searing pain that eclipsed the phantom aches of his training. He had pushed his body to its absolute limit.
Zero stood amidst the settling plume, sheathing Gesshilla with a soft, definitive click. Their eyes met across the newly formed rubble field. No victory celebration, no acknowledgment. Just the shared, cold understanding that it had worked. The chain had held. The whetstone had cut.
"The logical move," Jade rasped, his voice raw from dust and exertion, "would be to find a defensible position. Conserve energy."
Zero gave a single, sharp nod, his eyes scanning the oppressive, gray horizon. "The forest will not allow it."
As if summoned by his words, a new threat emerged. Not from creatures, but from the ground itself. A sickly, gray moss began to spread from the roots of the petrified trees with unnatural speed, slithering over the rubble of the Boulder-Back. It emitted a low, psychic hum that was a physical weight on the mind, a dull ache behind the eyes that sapped focus and sown seeds of despair. Jade's Observer's Eye flared to life, showing him the danger clearly in pulsing, malevolent waves of energy: staying still meant being slowly drained of the will to fight.
Then, from within the spreading gray blight, new forms emerged. Sleeker, deadlier versions of the Gravelings. Their bodies were carved from sharp, polished flint, and they moved with a chilling, coordinated intelligence, their glowing red eyes fixed on the two ascendants with predatory intent.
[Shard-Hunter - Lv. 2]
The final ten minutes became a hellish gauntlet of relentless motion. The blight forced them ever onward, a toxic tide at their heels, and the Shard-Hunters harried them like a pack of wolves, striking from the shadows of petrified trunks and from within the concealing gray moss.
There was no more domination, only pure, desperate survival.
Jade fought with a gritty, efficient brutality born of exhaustion. The "rising hook" movement—a deceptive upward arc—tore a leaping Shard-Hunter from the air, splintering its flint body against a stone tree. The "falling cleave"—a committed overhead chop—shattered one that got too close, the impact jarring up his arms and sending fresh waves of fire through his torn back muscles. But he was tiring, his movements losing their perfect, drilled form, becoming more raw and instinctual. He was a machine pushed past its design limits, grinding its own gears.
Zero was his anchor in the chaos. His Implacable Stillness could not hold back the blight, but it created temporary, precious pockets of clear air against the psychic pressure, giving Jade's mind a moment to reset. His Tenbatsu Ryūdan footwork allowed him to evade and reposition flawlessly through the treacherous terrain. He didn't waste energy on flashy techniques. A sheathed strike to a joint immobilized a Hunter. A precise, energy-severing cut with his fingers dismantled another that lunged for Jade's blind spot. He was the calculating mind to Jade's relentless heart, patching the holes in their defense with surgical precision.
They were a single, struggling organism, bound by necessity.
00:05...
A Shard-Hunter, smarter than the rest, flanked them while another charged from the front. It lunged low, aiming for Jade's hamstring as he was occupied with the frontal assault.
00:04...
Zero was there. Not with a blade, but with a stomp that descended like a piston. His heel connected with the Hunter's spine with a sound like a bag of rocks being smashed. The creature shattered into pieces.
00:03...
00:02...
Jade met the final creature's charge with a desperate, two-handed swing of his scythe, putting the last of his waning strength into the low, sweeping arc. The blade connected, cleaving the Shard-Hunter in two in a shower of sparking flint.
00:01...
Silence, save for their ragged breaths and the fading hum of the blight.
00:00.
The last shard of flint clattered to the petrified ground. The psychic hum of the blight ceased abruptly, and the gray moss began to wither and crumble into dust before their eyes.
A new, golden System screen materialized, its text triumphant.
<< FLOOR 2: THE PETRIFIED FOREST - CONQUERED. >>
<< REWARDS CALCULATING... >>
<< RETURNING TO SANCTUARY. >>
The world began to dissolve into shimmering particles of light. The oppressive silence of the dead forest was replaced by the familiar, low hum of the Sanctuary. The petrified trees, the fading moss, the rubble—all faded into nothingness.
As the transport took hold, the adrenaline that had sustained Jade vanished. He finally let his guard down, and a searing, hot pain lanced through his right shoulder and back—the muscles he had brutally abused with his untamed, desperate movements. It was a deep, structural ache that promised days of recovery. He grunted, his grip on the scythe tightening until his knuckles were white against the agony.
The cost of conquering the Second Floor was no longer theoretical; it was a physical debt his body demanded be paid.
The sterile white walls of the Sanctuary corridor solidified around them. The air was clean, empty of dust and the scent of ozone.
The Second Floor was cleared.
The last thing Jade saw before the transport completed was Zero's eyes, watching him, noting the injury with cold, analytical clarity. No pity. No concern. Only assessment.
The whetstone had been tested. The chain had held.
But both were now scarred by the grind. The 24-hour reprieve had begun.