Outside the dungeon, the calm of the park was shattered by a mechanical shriek from the Guild's monitoring van. The Mana Resonance Meter, a device calibrated to track the stability of the gate, suddenly spiked into the crimson zone.
"Director! We have a Code Red Mutation!" a technician wearing a black suit yelled, his hands flying across the terminal.
"The mana density just jumped from 600 points to 1200! The C - Rank gate is shifting... it's stabilized at B - Rank. With how the dungeon is evolving, we will experience a dungeon break in less than three hours!"
The Director's coffee cup hit the pavement. "A B - Rank mutation with a C - Rank party? That is a death sentence. Call the nearest B - Rank or high A - Rank hunters immediately! Dungeon break is our least of problems. If anything happens to Clyde and his teammates, we will have to deal with another case."
The air around the gate began to crackle with a crimson static, the very fabric of reality straining as the dungeon attempted to vomit its newfound power into the peaceful morning.
The atmosphere in the room shifted from the relief of victory to the icy grip of true terror. This wasn't anymore a standard Boss encounter, this was a Hidden Evolution - a phenomenon where a Dungeon Boss, pushed to the brink of death, absorbs the ambient mana of the dungeon to ascend to a higher rank.
Reagan stopped his pickaxe mid - swing. The shockwave from the Boss chamber rumbled through the floor, causing the Mana crystals to chime like a thousand tiny bells.
"Did you feel that?" a porter asked.
"Did they finally defeat it?" another one asked.
[Random Quest: Defeat the Evolved Dungeon Boss]
"It evolved? Is this why I had a vague bad feeling earlier? Then those guys are in trouble." Reagan whispered as he stared at the new notification.
He immediately started heading towards the Boss chamber.
The Evolved tarantula didn't wait. With it's new, metallic limbs, it moved at speed that defied it's size. It appeared in front of Alex before he could even raise his battered shield. A single leg, sharp as a blade, pierced through the reinforced steel and Alex's chest armor as if it were parchment.
"ALEX!" Leon screamed
The monster tossed the heavy tanker aside like a discarded doll. Alex slammed into a wall.
"High Heal! Divine Protection! Alya screamed, her voice cracking as she poured every drop of her remaining mana into a barrier enclosing Alex's almost lifeless body. The golden light flickered weakly against the oppressive red aura of the spider.
"It's no use," Clyde gritted his teeth, drawing his sword with his left hand. "Aurora, get the porters. Run. Leon, we buy them thirty seconds." He looked back only to see Aurora froze on the ground. The boss's aura immersed fear into her.
"Aurora!" he called again getting her attention.
She looked at the porters, they were fleeing all except one.
Reagan walked into the chamber, his footsteps calm and rhythmic against the chaos. He wasn't carrying a sword or a shield, just a pickaxe. He still had his porter's vest on, but the way he moved made the evolved monster pause.
The minions that were terrified by the sudden spike of mana in the dungeon, charged towards him trying to escape.
"Kid, get out of there!" Clyde roared. "You're going to die!"
Reagan didn't look at him. His eyes were locked on the wave of monsters approaching him.
"Stupid human. If you can't even save yourself, what did even you come here to do." Clyde muttered as he changed his direction and sprinted towards Reagan.
'Why? Why are they slow?' Reagan couldn't understand.
In the face of Clyde and the others, were already moving fast but in Reagan's perception, the monsters were drifting towards him like a falling leaf. His level hundred maxed agility were not mere speed. It was a fundamental alteration of physics. At the level of physical capability, the air didn't just move around him; it resisted him like thick, heavy sludge.
Before even Clyde could register what had happened, all the minions dropped dead, their bodies into pieces. Reagan had sliced them using a pickaxe.
The boss which was behind, lunged. It had recognized him as an enemy. The monster's lunge which others couldn't see it, appeared Reagan like a fly caught in amber. He watched the monster's multifaceted eyes twitch, saw the microscopic droplets of venom trailing from its fangs, and noted the exact structural weakness in its indescent chitin.
Reagan took a slow, measured breath. He didn't activate a skill. He didn't draw upon the mana of the world. Such things were unnecessary for a man who had spent a century refining the efficiency of single strikes.
He stepped forward.
The sound of his foot hitting the granite floor was like a canyon collapsing. The sheer kinetic energy of his displacement created a localized vaccum, pulling the air inward before exploding outward in a circular shockwave.
He swung his pickaxe.
It was a simple, horizontal harvest moon slash. To the onlookers, Reagan hadn't moved; he was simply there, and then he was here.
Crack.
The sound wasn't a hit; it was a sonic boom contained within the stone walls. The pickaxe didn't encounter any resistance. The B - rank exoskeleton, which could have ignored a nuclear weapon and anti material rifles, might as well have been made of wet tissue paper. The blade passed through the monster's head, sliced through the armored thorax, and exited the other side without slowing down.
The kinetic force didn't stop at the monster. The air pressure generated by the swing, a literal wall of compressed oxygen, slammed into the far wall of the chamber. A five meter deep trench was instantly carved into the wall, stretching ten meters long as if a giant's invisible finger had been dragged through the earth.
The tarantula didn't just die. It atomized.
The top half of the beast was converted into a fine, violet mist. The bottom half was hammered into the ground by the sheer vacuum left in the wake of the swing, collapsing into a heap of twitching, limbs