The bird did not stay down.
He had known, somewhere in the back of his mind trained by months of dungeon work, that a boss at this rank would not simply fold because one wing was compromised. What he had not anticipated was the way it chose to respond.
It did not stand. It did not charge.
It split.
"Oh come on ".
The process was silent and deeply wrong in the way only dungeon phenomena could be — a visual fact that the brain refused to process cleanly on the first pass. The bird's body shuddered once, the damaged wing folding inward, and then it came apart. Not violently. Not with sound or light or the theatrical energy of a skill being released. It simply became more of itself, each copy peeling away from the original like pages separating from a book, until the chamber floor was no longer occupied by one creature.
It was occupied by many.
Rean stopped counting at two hundred and the number was still climbing.
"This is so not fair".
