Roman and Rena faced quite a handful of Goblin Raiders on their way to the Goblin King's Chamber.
The path was easy enough to follow since the BSP was marking the location in real time, which was one of the more practical advantages of having it. Nothing remarkable about that for any Entrant, but useful all the same.
Reaching the Goblin King was never going to be as simple as walking a straight line. Every goblin standing between them and that chamber had to be cleared first. The King would not move from behind its Guardians until the last layer of protection was stripped away, and that wasn't cowardice. It was the logic of a ruler who understood that its death meant the complete collapse of the entire territory.
The Raiders kept coming, and after a while the numbers started to feel genuinely concerning.
"Damn, how are there so many of them?!" Roman cursed.
"Because there are," Rena replied, and for the first time since they had entered the castle, the unease on her face was not something she was bothering to hide.
She had expected resistance. But this volume was a different thing entirely. The Raiders were attacking in dense, overlapping groups, pushing both of them back with every wave and making it nearly impossible to advance. Step by step, ground by ground, they were being forced in reverse until they had retreated all the way back to the first room where the Shamans had fallen.
"For the love of...!" Roman's eyes burned with barely contained fury as he channelled fireball after fireball in rapid succession, launching them one after another into the mass of advancing bodies.
It wasn't enough to stop them. The numbers absorbed the damage and kept pressing.
Rena had abandoned any thought of using [Phantom Shift]. The Raiders were packed too densely and moving too unpredictably. One wrong reappearance in the middle of that crowd and a bone spear would end her without ceremony. So she held her ground with the dagger instead, and Roman, watching her work up close for the first time, quietly forgot to keep firing for a moment.
She was something else with that blade.
Any Raider that got close enough to attempt a spear swing found its window closing before it fully opened. She read every angle, slipped under every overhead strike, and by the time the goblin registered that she had moved, its throat was already open or her blade had found the gap between its ribs. Clean, unhurried, and completely without panic.
Roman found himself staring longer than he intended to.
"What?!" She snapped, catching him.
"Nothing," Roman said, launching another fireball without looking at her. "You just look dangerous with that dagger."
"That's not a compliment, right?"
"No. Not really."
It took several more minutes before the last Raider in the first room finally dropped and the space went quiet again. Roman and Rena stood among the fallen bodies and caught their breath, and then pushed back into the inner sections of the castle.
Six Goblin Guardians were waiting for them.
Neither Roman nor Rena was particularly rattled by that. They had already faced one Guardian at the entrance and knew how it moved. Six was a different scale of difficulty, but not an impossible one, and the number was manageable compared to the tide of Raiders they had just pushed through.
Rena was the first to look at Roman this time. He read the signal before she even fully gave it.
They moved together.
Roman opened with [Rock Bash], and the strike connected hard against the arm of the nearest Guardian, ripping the spear clean from its grip and sending it spinning with enough force to tear straight through the skull of a second Guardian standing behind it. Two down before the engagement had properly started.
Rena was already through the gap, appearing beside the disarmed Guardian with [Phantom Shift] and ending it without breaking stride. She glanced back at Roman and gave a single nod.
Roman smirked and turned to the next one.
Four remained, split evenly between them. They had barely settled into position when the Guardians abandoned any notion of patience and charged simultaneously, spears already swinging before the distance had closed, clearly intent on disrupting any attack before it could be set up.
Rena vanished.
The two charging at her lurched to a stop, heads snapping in every direction, the aggression draining out of them and replaced with something closer to confusion. They had no framework for a target that simply ceased to exist.
They never found one.
SLASH!
SLASH!
Two strikes from behind, precise and unhesitating, and both Guardians folded where they stood.
"Nice try, punks," Rena muttered, stepping over them.
On his end, Roman had used [Anti Balance] to absorb the force of the charge the moment the Guardians reached him, killing their momentum entirely, and finished both of them off with a rapid sequence of [Ice Shot] before they could recover their footing.
They both turned and looked ahead at the same time.
The throne room entrance was only metres away now, the massive stone doorway framing a darkness deeper than the rest of the castle, and what waited inside it was the only thing left standing between them and the end of this.
The unspoken competition between them had been running quietly in the background all night, but standing here now, it rose to the surface and became something neither of them pretended wasn't there.
"The King is mine," Rena said.
"Not a chance, Assassin," Roman replied. "It's mine."
"We'll see about that."
She shifted into a combat stance and levelled the blade of her dagger at him, the message unmistakable. Roman was going to have to get through her first.
She was confident, and she had every reason to be. [Phantom Shift] was a tool Roman couldn't match as a Mage, and she knew it. The smile on her face said as much.
Then she saw him smile back, and the confidence flickered just slightly.
"You do realise you could die in here and your family would never see you again?" she said.
"I do realise that," Roman said. "I also realise that's not happening."
He disappeared.
Not a sprint, not a dash. He was simply there one moment and gone the next, swallowed completely by the darkness of the hallway without a sound.
Rena went rigid.
Roman held his position for a few seconds, completely invisible, watching her head turn slowly as she searched for any trace of him. There was nothing to find.
He made his decision quickly. He had been protecting the secret of his Profession switching this entire time, and she had pushed him to reveal it, but there was no point wasting the advantage on her when the Goblin King was right through that door.
He moved.
...
The throne room was wide and cold, its stone walls rising high into shadow, the air carrying the weight of something old and territorial. At the far end, on a throne carved entirely from dark stone and large bones fitted together with crude but unmistakable intention, the Goblin King sat.
It was massive. Broader and taller than any Guardian they had faced, its body draped in a patchwork of armour assembled from the materials of the castle itself. A bone sword rested across its knees, long and razor-edged, and its eyes, deep red and burning with a slow intelligence, were already moving.
It was tracking him.
Roman stopped.
He had not made a sound. He had not disturbed the air in any detectable way. And yet the Goblin King's gaze was following the exact path he had walked, moving from point to point with a precision that left no room for coincidence.
It couldn't see him directly. It was tracking his shadow.
Before Roman could act on that, footsteps entered the throne room behind him.
The Goblin King's attention shifted immediately to Rena as she stepped through the entrance, and what came next left no room for preparation.
It crossed the throne room in a burst of speed that had no right existing in something that large, bone sword raised and already swinging before Rena had fully processed the distance closing between them. She moved just in time, pulling herself along the only available escape path, but not cleanly enough.
The Goblin King's left arm caught her on the way through, and the impact sent her off her feet entirely, crashing hard into a stone table across the room.
"Argh!"
She hit the ground and was already rolling before the pain had finished registering, because the King was already moving again, pressing forward with a ferocity that filled the entire room.
She was fast. But it was faster, and angrier, and it was not giving her a moment to settle or breathe. She kept moving, kept reading, kept waiting for the opening that a creature fighting at this intensity was going to have to leave eventually.
And then it finally came.
The Goblin King turned its head sharply at something she couldn't identify, its attention breaking for just a fraction of a second, and Rena quickly drove her dagger into its arm without hesitation.
She pulled back to strike again as it felt like a golden opportunity, and then suddenly...
The Goblin King's head left its shoulders.
A single clean cut from an invisible blade, and the massive body swayed once before crashing to the throne room floor, sending a tremor through the stone beneath their feet.
The invisibility dropped the next moment, and Rena's eyes widened when she saw him.
Roman stood where the killing blow had been delivered, blade in hand, wearing the kind of smile that was equal parts satisfaction and deliberate provocation.
Rena stared at him from across the throne room, and the expression on her face cycled through rage, disbelief, and something that looked very much like the beginning of a question she didn't yet have the words for.
'How???!!!'
Roman looked at her for a moment, then tilted his head slightly.
"Heads up, Assassin. Better luck next time."