Chapter 73: One Run. Then I Leave.
Chapter 73: One Run. Then I Leave.
The notification lit the room before sunrise.
Jin happened to be awake already.
That was because he was leaving home today. Obviously. A person had plenty to think about on a day like that, so he would have been lying there awake whether the boss reset or not.
Glitch did not buy this explanation.
The real lizard opened one gold eye as soon as the phone brightened. He watched Jin make a careful effort not to look at it, then gave a short, flat noise that meant sure.
[Rotmist Salamander Encounter Restored]
[Acid Breath: 2/3]
[Meridian Transport Arrival: 02:47:18]
Two hours and forty-seven minutes remained.
Jin repeated the calculation from last night, though the answer had not changed while he slept. Two and three-quarter hours gave him enough time for one prepared attempt and the rest of his departure tasks.
There was no honest version of the numbers that included a second run.
If the avatar died, the respawn queue would take two hours. He did not have two hours to lose. Whatever happened inside the arena would happen once.
One life. One attempt. The reward would be whatever the game decided to give him.
That was the morning in full.
Oddly, Jin found he could accept it.
He left the dungeon unopened.
A week ago, he would not have done that. The version of him from his first life certainly would not have. The encounter was ready, Acid Breath might be one clear away, and still Jin got out of bed and dealt with the bag first.
He folded the remaining clothes and packed them, including the single blanket Elsa had forced him to accept. His original documents went into the inner pocket of his jacket: ID, scholarship confirmation, and transport authorization. He sealed them close against his body exactly as Arthur had instructed on four separate occasions.
Apparently, repeating the warning a fourth time really had worked.
Jin compared the transport confirmation with the enrollment paper once more. After that, he removed Glitch from the bag.
The lizard had moved back in during the night.
Jin placed him on the blanket. Glitch climbed into the bag again. Jin took him out a second time, and the two of them settled on a temporary truce that neither side intended to respect forever.
Breakfast came next.
It was only ration porridge, thin but hot. Elena had worked a night shift, so Jin helped in the kitchen rather than letting her handle everything before dawn.
The temptation stayed with him through all of it. He was aware of the restored encounter while folding clothes, checking papers, moving Glitch, and stirring breakfast.
He simply refused to let one dungeon run take the whole morning before it even began.
Only after the bag was truly finished, his documents were secure, and everyone in the apartment was awake and had eaten did Jin sit down with the phone.
Elsa saw him checking the reset timer above his porridge.
She understood immediately. Of course she did.
"No."
"One run."
"This is our last morning."
"One attempt," Jin said again. "I’m not farming. I won’t sit around waiting for another reset, and there isn’t enough time for one anyway. I won’t even test the reward afterward. I fight it once, take whatever drops, and stop. If the battle runs too long, I quit and leave."
He held her gaze.
"You can keep time."
Elsa narrowed her eyes.
She had spent fourteen years living with him. During those years, she had seen the phrase one run grow into an entire afternoon often enough that she clearly considered it untrustworthy.
She pulled the stool across the floor and planted it directly beside him. From there, she could see the whole screen. Her arms folded.
"I’ll watch the clock," she said. "You get one run. The moment it starts taking time away from saying goodbye, I pull the plug. I don’t care what the screen says."
"Deal."
Arthur did not order Jin to put the game away.
He had never supported Jin’s gaming habit, and nothing about his expression suggested that had changed. But Arthur had once been young in places harsher than this apartment. He knew there was a difference between chasing something without control and taking one last shot after preparing properly.
He looked at Jin over the rim of his cup.
"A limit means nothing just because you said it out loud, boy. Any idiot can decide on a limit."
Arthur paused.
"It matters when you stop even though stopping hurts. That’s the test. Not choosing the line. Obeying it."
Jin nodded as though Arthur had given him another ordinary warning.
The words stayed in his head anyway.
They remained there for the entire fight.
All the required materials were already banked. The optimized route had produced enough Corrosive Glands and Rustjaw Scutes over the last few days, so there was no gathering phase left.
Jin deployed immediately.
The digital Glitch entered the restored arena carrying the instincts built through every previous clear.
The real Glitch settled against Jin’s side on the cot. He was not the one fighting, but the bond still carried the tension between them. Focus moved both ways.
The lizard beside Jin did not possess the avatar’s dungeon memories. He had no Corrosion Resistance, and the Salamander fight had not been trained into his muscles.
He did have Jin’s nerves.
Glitch pressed closer, and that helped far more than it reasonably should have.
Jin switched to manual control.
Their first attempt against the Salamander had been a desperate experiment that lasted close to an hour and nearly killed them.
Now the opening setup took minutes.
The boss had not become weaker. It was freshly restored, still 4-Star, and every bit as lethal as before. Jin and Glitch had simply stopped wasting movements on questions they had already answered.
During the first barrage, the glands went onto the correct supports. Each scute landed in its assigned place. Glitch damaged the platform’s keystone, withdrew, and reached the bait position without Jin needing to send a complete instruction.
The sequence moved like practice.
Because it was practice.
Six glands placed. Three scutes staged. The platform came down, trapping the furious Salamander beneath it. Its neck was forced clear of the reservoir, leaving the gills above the water.
They knew this ground.
Then the ground changed.
Corrosion caused it.
Somewhere during the reset, an old stress point had weakened beyond what Jin accounted for. Constant acid finally broke an overflow channel beneath the arena.
The flow shifted.
A broad sheet of acid spread in a direction it had never taken during the previous three battles. It crossed one of Jin’s prepared paths and flooded a scute position with fresh acid before Glitch could reach it.
The plan broke open in the middle of the fight.
Jin’s first response was the wrong one.
He tried to force the old route.
It had succeeded three times. The strategy was proven. He knew how it worked, and when something had worked before, the easiest answer was always to demand that it work again.
He began sending Glitch down the same path.
Glitch refused.
At the edge of the new acid spread, he planted his feet and resisted the command travelling through the bond.
It was not pointless disobedience.
Glitch had sensed the altered flow before Jin understood what he was seeing.
Wrong now. Look.
For one important second, Jin had to admit the previous fights were no longer instructions carved into stone.
He stopped pushing.
Then he released the route entirely.
Show me, he sent.
No replacement order followed. Jin gave Glitch control of the immediate problem and watched what he chose.
Glitch read the moving acid for himself. He found footing Jin could not identify from the status display and followed a line through the arena that had not existed until the channel ruptured.
While Glitch moved, Jin studied him.
The larger strategy changed around that new path. Jin recalculated where the next gill opening would happen, which scute cover remained usable, and how far the timing had to shift to match the route Glitch had discovered.
That was what had changed between them.
Weeks earlier, Glitch had ignored a bad command and turned out to be right.
Now Jin gave him room on purpose.
Glitch handled the movement in front of him, trusting his body and instincts. Jin held the wider structure, the timing, and the full shape of the encounter.
He was no longer a master pointing a weapon.
They were two parts of the same fighter, with each one taking the work he did better.
The Salamander had no interest in their personal development.
It continued trying very hard to kill them.
Without the safe route, Glitch’s toxin meter rose much faster. The altered acid forced him closer to the boss than Jin had ever planned.
The Salamander changed its own pattern as well. It stopped releasing complete breaths. Instead, it used short bursts to block paths while keeping the weakened gills protected and conserving its reserve.
Then it combined two attacks.
A false inhale drew out the dodge. At the same time, the tail came around from the freed side while Glitch was already committed.
The strike almost connected.
Glitch caught the feint a fraction early. Jin took the reversal and worked it into the wider sequence without pausing. The tail tore through the space where Glitch had been.
Only barely.
The toxin meter kept climbing. It did not care how close the miss had been.
They were ahead.
That did not make them safe.
Every second spent moving nearer to the Salamander’s neck pushed Glitch farther into amber.
"Jin. Fifteen minutes."
Elsa’s voice entered the fight without rising.
The broken route had stretched the encounter far beyond the length of their last clear. Most of the morning had vanished, though none of the battle had felt slow while Jin was inside it.
He heard her.
That mattered.
The apartment did not disappear around him. The screen had not swallowed the room. Jin knew where he was.
He was sitting on the cot. His sister was beside him, keeping the time. His family waited only a few feet away. Meridian’s transport was coming.
And on the phone in his hands, the boss was two-thirds dead.