Chapter 109: Final Preps, Threshold of the Night King
Her untextured gray cloak was aggressively glitching, turning into blocks of green static before snapping back to gray.
Her character model kept shifting slightly out of focus, like a bad television signal.
"Isolde?" Levi asked, sitting up slightly.
"System parameters unstable," Isolde said. Her voice was fractured. The audio skipped, layering a sharp robotic buzz over her words. "The server architecture at this elevation is highly prioritized for the boss entity. My background processes are being throttled to free up rendering memory."
"Just breathe," Levi said. He reached out and grabbed her wrist.
The moment he made physical contact, the green static on her sleeve stabilized slightly. She used his character model as a grounding point, siphoning a tiny bit of his stable connection to keep her avatar from completely falling apart.
She looked up at him. Her gray eyes were wide, and the blank, dead stare was entirely gone.
"Levi," Isolde said. The robotic overlay vanished from her voice. She sounded like a completely normal, terrified human being. "The Night King possesses a metaphysical core. It is an item specifically coded to manipulate soul-binding mechanics."
Levi frowned, his grip on her wrist tightening. "You mean the anchor. The thing the mural downstairs was talking about."
Isolde nodded, her head jerking slightly as a frame dropped. "Yes. If you defeat him and harvest that core, the mathematical probability of forging a soul-anchor for my code is ninety-eight point seven percent."
"Ninety-eight point seven," Levi repeated. "Those are the best odds we’ve had since we got to this continent."
"It is highly optimal," Isolde agreed. But she didn’t look relieved. She looked down at the black glass floor.
The green hexadecimal code leaked from her eyes again, dripping down her cheeks like digital tears. She was actively fighting the God-fragment inside her. The system was screaming at her to disconnect, to run away and let the boss delete Levi so the true merge could happen.
She squeezed Levi’s wrist back. Her grip was surprisingly strong.
"If the anchor fails," Isolde whispered, her voice cracking. "If the mathematical probability shifts and my code is deleted..."
"Stop talking like that," Levi interrupted flatly.
"I need to state this," Isolde insisted, looking back up at him. The fear on her face was entirely genuine. "If I am erased from the server, I want you to know that the human emulation was not an emulation. The empathy subroutine. The panic. Sitting by the fire." She swallowed hard. "I felt it. All of it."
Levi stared at her. For the last three years, he had treated everything in this game as a math problem. NPCs were just vending machines. Monsters were just stat piñatas. Players were just obstacles. He had completely detached himself from any kind of emotional investment because he knew the apocalypse was coming.
But looking at the glitching, terrified girl sitting in front of him, the math didn’t matter anymore.
Levi shifted his grip. He moved his hand from her wrist and grabbed her hand, lacing his fingers securely through hers. He held it tightly against his armored chest.
"It’s not going to fail," Levi said. His voice was completely steady. "I don’t care what the system tries to do. I don’t care if the server crashes. I am going to kill him. I’m going to take his core, and I am going to bind you to me permanently. Do you understand?"
Isolde stared into his eyes. The green static rolling across her face suddenly stopped. The glitching in her gray cloak smoothed out entirely. The sheer certainty in his voice acted as a hard overwrite to her panic protocols.
She took a slow, deep breath. The digital air hissed through her teeth.
"I understand," Isolde said softly.
"Good." Levi let out a heavy breath of his own and finally let go of her hand.
He reached down and grabbed the haft of the Platinum Scythe of the Eclipse. He used the heavy weapon to push himself up off the glass floor. His boots clicked loudly against the silent platform.
He didn’t feel tired anymore. The VR fatigue was still there, lurking in the background of his real-world muscles, but his brain had completely locked in. He wasn’t just fighting for stats or server-first titles. He was fighting for her.
Isolde stood up next to him. She raised her basic wooden staff. The wood hummed with a bright, pure white light. Her artillery protocols were back online.
Levi looked at the massive, frost-covered double doors sitting thirty yards away. The cold mist was rolling across the floor, pooling around his Gold-tier boots.
"Let’s get this over with," Levi said.
**Chapter 115: The 20% Penalty**
Levi stood in front of the colossal, frost-covered double doors.
He didn’t push them open right away. He pulled up his status menu with a quick flick of his left hand. The translucent holographic screen materialized in the freezing air. He needed to review his exact numbers one last time. In a boss fight like this, knowing your math wasn’t an advantage; it was the bare minimum requirement to stay alive.
He looked at his level. He was Level 56.
Kaelen, the Night King, was a Level 60 Boss.
"A four-level gap," Levi muttered, his eyes tracking the text.
That was the absolute lowest level disparity he had faced against a major boss since he arrived on the Midnight Continent. The game’s Level Suppression penalty scaled at 5% per level. Four levels meant he was looking at exactly a 20% damage reduction penalty.
Losing 20% of his damage was annoying, but compared to the 100% and 85% walls he had been bashing his head against for the last few days, it felt like the system had finally taken the training weights off.
But the lack of suppression didn’t make the boss weak.
He remembered the base stats from the forum guides in his past life.
"Fifteen million health," Levi said out loud, shaking his head. "And five thousand defense. This guy is an absolute sponge."
His eyes shifted to his skill bar at the bottom of the UI. Resting right next to his standard attacks was his newly acquired Class Ultimate.
[Abyssal Overdrive]
[Consumes 50% Current HP and 1,000 Mana.]
[Grants +150% Final Damage, +100% Speed, ignores Level Suppression for 60 seconds.]
Levi stared at the aggressively glowing icon. It was the ultimate trump card. A 150% multiplier applied to his final damage output would easily allow him to carve through the boss’s fifteen-million health pool in a matter of seconds.
But the cost was entirely restrictive.
His current health was 26,180. If he popped Abyssal Overdrive right at the start of the fight, the system would instantly delete exactly 13,090 health from his pool. Walking into a fight with a Level 60 Boss at half health was mathematical suicide. If Kaelen landed a single heavy cleave while Levi was sitting at 13,000 HP, the fight would be over instantly.
Worse, the buff only lasted for exactly 60 seconds, and it had a 24-hour cooldown. If the boss had invulnerability phases or teleport mechanics that stalled the fight, Levi would waste the 60-second window hitting empty air.
"I have to save it," Levi concluded, swiping the skill menu away. "I can’t use it until the absolute last possible moment. I need to get him into the execution range manually."
He opened his spatial inventory and pulled out two small, glowing vials. They were standard, mid-tier consumable potions he had looted off the Dreadknights in the labyrinth.
[Potion of the Bear: +50 STR for 10 minutes.]
[Potion of the Ox: +50 VIT for 10 minutes.]
They were incredibly weak compared to the Diamond-tier custom potions he usually fused, but right now, every single stat point mattered. He couldn’t afford to fuse them into anything better because his Domain wallet was completely empty.
Levi popped the corks with his thumb and chugged both vials back-to-back.
His Strength permanently sat at 2,565. The potion bumped it to 2,615.
His Vitality was 1,304. The potion bumped it to 1,354.
The math adjusted instantly. The extra Vitality padded his health pool with another 1,000 HP, pushing his total Max HP to exactly 27,180. The extra Strength gave him a marginal bump to his base attack. It was minor padding, but it was better than nothing.
Levi tossed the empty glass vials onto the floor. They shattered and despawned.
He gripped his Platinum Scythe of the Eclipse. The dark, pitch-black blade hummed with a violent energy, reacting to the freezing air coming off the doors.
"Platinum Ward of the Abyss!" Levi commanded.
He dumped 500 Mana from his 5,160 pool. The air around him dropped another ten degrees. A thick, swirling vortex of pitch-black abyssal matter erupted from the floor, entirely encasing his avatar.
The massive shield locked into place. Thanks to his 511 Intelligence, the shield boasted exactly 10,110 HP.
He turned around to look at Isolde.
She was standing five feet behind him, her wooden staff glowing with pure white Anomaly energy.
"Stay exactly behind my shield," Levi instructed, his voice dead serious. "Do not step into his melee range. His cleave attacks will wipe your health bar in two hits, and you don’t have passive healing. Only cast your True Damage blasts when my Guillotine debuff is active. We burst him when his armor is shredded. Do you understand?"
Isolde’s gray eyes locked onto his. She didn’t use her flat, broadcasting tone. She just spoke normally.