Chapter 51: The Third Attempt
Chapter 51: The Third Attempt
Jin watched both recordings back-to-back while the respawn clock ran down, building the entire battle in his mind until he could see it from beginning to end.
The boss regenerated everything except damage to its core. The core stopped moving only during the crushing slam. Cracking it triggered the mire phase.
And the mire—
He replayed its expansion.
There it was.
What had killed Glitch during the second attempt wasn’t the mire itself. It was their instinctive response to it.
The mire spread outward from the boss. It didn’t appear across the whole chamber at once. It bloomed from the center and rolled toward the walls. That meant the seemingly safe ground—the open floor near the exit, the direction every instinct demanded they run—was exactly where the wave was heading.
Running for daylight meant running directly into the flood’s leading edge.
The clear space wasn’t at the perimeter.
It was inward.
There would be a pocket tight against the boss’s collapsing body, ground the mire left behind as it rolled away. The safest-looking direction was a trap. The dangerous direction—pressing closer to the creature trying to kill them—was the only place that might remain clear.
"Don’t run from it," Jin murmured, working it out aloud. "Run into it. Great. That’s going to feel completely insane."
The avatar reassembled at the spawn point.
[Encounter Window Remaining: Approximately 01:24:00]
Jin didn’t send Glitch a string of commands. He sent the shape of the plan through their bond: the crack, the slam, the bait—and then the part that mattered. He showed Glitch the mire blooming outward and the avatar driving inward against it, occupying the pocket close to the boss instead of fleeing toward the walls.
He felt Glitch receive it. Study it. Turn it over.
Then the answer came back—not obedience and not a question, but understanding. A cold, focused yes.
Whatever the arena had built between them, it held.
Your call on the footwork, Jin sent. I’ll tell you when to commit. You handle the rest.
Glitch’s tail went flat and still.
The third attempt was a different animal.
Glitch entered the chamber already reading the boss. He slipped through the opening barrage before it fully formed, moving to where the slime shots weren’t and ducking the first pass of the whip-arm instead of the third.
He didn’t waste a single strike on the outer body. He had stopped seeing the green hill as an enemy at all.
It was terrain now.
Terrain that healed.
He baited the crushing slam with cold patience.
The King reared. Its core settled beneath the crown. The membrane stretched thin—
Glitch struck the existing crack, driving the fracture wider. The blue light split further with a sound like ice giving way.
The mire bloomed.
This time, as the sticky flood erupted outward, Glitch did the insane thing.
He didn’t run for the exit.
He charged the boss.
He drove inward into the narrowing pocket of clean ground, tight against the King’s collapsing body, and planted himself there while the wave rolled away toward the walls he would have died trying to reach.
Jin’s breath caught. Every instinct in him screamed that it was backward—and then he saw that Glitch had read it correctly. Better than correctly. The lizard tucked himself into the exact clean patch the flood couldn’t reach.
The King lashed at him in a fury. Cornered and desperate, it whipped a heavy arm of slime toward the small dark creature lodged against its side.
Glitch didn’t dodge. Dodging meant surrendering the pocket.
He braced.
His hardened hide met the glancing blow. The avatar’s health dropped and damage flared across Jin’s screen, but Glitch held his ground. No broken bone was real. No wound would cross into the body asleep on the blanket.
And the pocket remained his.
The mire receded. The damaged core, cracked and exposed, hung naked beneath the failing crown.
Jin sent one word.
Finish it.
Glitch lunged and closed his jaws around the blue core.
It shattered.
The Moss-Crowned Slime King came apart all at once. Its immense green body lost cohesion, sending stone slabs and the mossy crown sliding to the floor. Its remaining mass slumped and spread harmlessly through the chamber until nothing remained except a wide, still pool glittering beneath the cavern light.
[Area Boss Defeated]
[Mossy Hollow — First Clear Complete]
[Clear Attempts: 3]
[Avatar Deaths: 2]
There was no flawless rating. No perfect-clear banner. Three attempts and two deaths stood openly in the record.
Jin looked at the result and felt more satisfied than any clean victory had ever made him. They hadn’t overpowered the creature. They had learned it. They had died, watched, adjusted, and returned knowing more each time until knowledge became enough.
That was the whole fantasy, sitting in four lines on a cheap phone.
The rewards resolved.
[Boss Core Obtained: Moss-Crowned Slime Core ×1]
[Coins Obtained: 150]
[Skill Fragment Obtained: Lesser Regeneration — 1/3]
[Collect Three Matching Fragments to Form a Complete Skill Book]
Jin sat upright.
One hundred fifty coins—a real haul, with the first-clear bonus stacked on top. A boss core, whatever those were used for. And a skill fragment.
Lesser Regeneration.
His gaze moved immediately to the corner. To the blanket. To the injured leg propped up and healing at the slow, honest speed of flesh.
Regeneration.
For one bright, foolish second, the whole possibility lit up in his mind. A healing skill poured into that leg. The wound gone by tomorrow. Glitch walking normally again before the examination results even arrived.
Then Jin reread the smaller text.
1/3.
One fragment. And beneath it: Collect three matching fragments to form a complete Skill Book.
One-third of a skill wasn’t a skill. It was a promise attached to a shopping list.
Even if he possessed all three fragments now, Jin wouldn’t Sync an unfamiliar ability into an injured body without understanding the risks. The fragment didn’t change that rule.
It merely gave him a very good reason to return and kill this boss until the other two fragments appeared.
Long-term objective, he catalogued, genuine hunger stirring beneath the thought. Kill this thing enough times, and I can build my beast a healing skill out of drops. From my couch. While his real body sleeps.
The economy of this world was completely broken.
Jin was very glad it was broken in his direction.
The real Glitch awakened while his avatar stood over the settling pool.
He raised his head and blinked. Satisfaction rolled through their bond—the deep, warm contentment of having won, even though his physical body had never left the blanket. Somewhere inside him, in the part connected to the body of light, he knew he had defeated the hill that crushed him.
He was insufferably pleased about it.
Jin turned the phone toward him and displayed the screen.
Glitch did not understand fractions.
What he understood was the defeated boss spread flat across the chamber and four glowing lines that unmistakably meant you did that.
His chest puffed out. His head rose to a magnificent angle. He regarded the shattered pool like a conqueror surveying a fallen empire, then looked at Jin as if to say, See?
"Yeah," Jin admitted. "You did well. It took three tries, but you did well."
Glitch chose to hear only the compliment.
A normal beast received one life with which to understand an enemy.
Glitch had needed three.
Jin looked at the shattered boss core, the stored growth quietly accumulating in the bank, and the first regeneration fragment glowing above it all.
Fortunately, three lives had been the cheapest thing he had spent all week.