Chapter 62: [62]: Unleashing the Diamond, 8,000 DPS
The timer in the corner of Levi’s vision ticked down to 4:59.
Levi exploded forward.
His Speed stat was sitting at an insane 176. With the Diamond buff surging through his veins, the game engine physically struggled to track him. He didn’t run across the iron platform; he blurred. He covered the distance between the edge of the arena and the massive, fifty-foot titan in a fraction of a second.
Valdor The Chained noticed the tiny speck of black armor rushing toward him. The boss didn’t bother using a skill. It just swung a massive fist the size of a boulder in a heavy, horizontal sweep aimed right at the platform to crush Levi like an insect.
Levi didn’t try to outrun the massive hitbox.
"Hollow’s Ward!" Levi shouted.
He dumped 150 Mana. The pitch-black, swirling dark-matter shield erupted around him. It didn’t matter that the shield only had 755 HP and Valdor’s attack was 2,500. Levi wasn’t using it for defense. He was using it for the Gold-tier skill’s secondary effect: absolute immunity to knockback and stagger.
The second the shield flared, Levi chained his next skill.
"Phantom Step!"
He burned another 20 Mana. His body dissolved into pitch-black shadow just as the boulder-sized fist smashed through his dark-matter shield. The shield shattered instantly, but the knockback immunity kept Levi perfectly anchored in his teleport animation.
He bypassed the physical impact entirely and reappeared directly behind Valdor’s massive obsidian ankle.
Levi planted his boots, twisted his hips, and dumped 100 Mana.
"Hollow’s Guillotine!"
The Sovereign’s Deathknell erupted in a blinding mixture of dark-gold class energy and prismatic starlight. Levi ripped the heavy scythe upward in a massive, ten-meter-wide cone that carved directly into the titan’s thick rock armor.
The system ran the math without any suppression penalties choking the numbers.
Valdor had 1,500 Defense. Levi’s Gold-tier scythe ignored 20% of it, dropping the effective Defense to 1,200.
Levi’s buffed Total Attack was 2,980. The Hollow’s Guillotine skill carried a massive 3.5 multiplier.
2,980 multiplied by 3.5 equaled exactly 10,430 raw damage.
10,430 raw damage minus the 1,200 effective Defense.
[-9,230]
A colossal, critical red number exploded into the smoky sky.
Valdor let out a deafening, earth-shaking roar. The titan staggered forward, the sheer kinetic force of a nearly ten-thousand-damage hit registering on its character model. The boss had a 2.5 million HP pool, but that single swing had just visibly chunked the red bar.
But the damage wasn’t the most important part of the skill. The debuff triggered instantly. A broken shield icon popped up over Valdor’s head. The Gold-tier skill shredded another 20% of the boss’s remaining defense.
Valdor’s active Defense plummeted to exactly 960.
"Now the real fun begins," Levi smirked.
He didn’t stop moving. With the titan’s defense shredded, his basic attacks were completely uncapped.
Levi unleashed an absolute blender of physical strikes. He spun the heavy scythe around his body, hacking relentlessly into the back of the boss’s ankle joint.
Math check for the basics: 2,980 Attack minus the newly shredded 960 Defense.
That meant every single basic swing was hitting for exactly 2,020 Final Damage.
Because his Agility was sitting at 156 and his Speed was 176, his swing timer was ridiculously fast. The heavy scythe didn’t feel heavy anymore; it felt like a blur of light. He was landing roughly four basic strikes every single second.
Slash. Slash. Slash. Slash.
[-2,020] [-2,020] [-2,020] [-2,020]
He was generating over 8,000 DPS. The numbers flooded his screen so fast they overlapped.
But the damage numbers weren’t the only things popping up. The Sovereign’s Deathknell had a 10% Lifesteal passive. Ten percent of 2,020 was exactly 202.
Every single time the scythe hit the boss, a bright green [+202] floated up from Levi’s avatar. He was healing over 800 HP a second. His Max HP was only 2,060. He was constantly over-healing his entire health pool in a matter of seconds. It didn’t matter if he took chip damage from the environment; he was functionally immortal as long as he kept swinging.
The scythe’s bleed passive triggered. The tiny teardrop icon appeared over Valdor’s head, ticking for 5 true damage a second. It was completely irrelevant compared to the massive 2,000 damage swings, but it added to the absolute chaos on the screen.
Valdor was confused. The boss AI wasn’t programmed to deal with a single target dealing raid-level DPS from its blind spot.
The titan roared and stomped its massive left foot into the iron platform.
The stomp didn’t target Levi directly. It triggered an environmental AoE. Rivers of liquid magma burst out of the iron grates across the entire platform, creating rolling waves of fire that swept across the floor.
Levi kept his eyes glued to the incoming magma waves.
He ran the defensive math. Valdor had 2,500 Attack. Levi’s current Defense was 128.
2,500 minus 128 equaled 2,372 incoming damage.
Levi’s Max HP was 2,060.
"If that fire touches me, I die instantly," Levi noted, his face completely calm. "No safety net. Got it."
He didn’t panic. He just relied entirely on his 176 Speed. He stopped his attack combo for a fraction of a second, physically sidestepped a rolling wave of magma, and instantly resumed his onslaught on the boss’s other ankle.
[-2,020] [-2,020] [-2,020]
The players who were halfway up the crater walls had stopped running. Thousands of them turned around to look down at the iron platform. The entire zone was dead silent except for the deafening sound of Levi’s scythe smashing into obsidian armor.
"Look at the boss’s health bar," Gideon whispered, pointing down with a trembling hand. "It’s moving. The health bar is actually moving."
They were watching a single player in pitch-black armor carve a World Boss apart.
Levi didn’t care about his audience. He was entirely locked into the math. The five-minute timer in the corner of his vision was ticking down mercilessly.
[4:15] [4:00] [3:45]
He had to manage his debuff perfectly. Every ten seconds, he dumped 100 Mana to recast Hollow’s Guillotine, ensuring the 20% armor shred never dropped. He wove his basic attacks flawlessly between the skill cooldowns.
When Valdor tried to swat him with a massive, sweeping backhand, Levi didn’t have a shield to face-tank it. He just used Phantom Step, burning 20 Mana to teleport right through the titan’s hand, reappearing in the air next to its knee and resuming his combo on the way down.
His mana pool was the only real bottleneck. Between the 100 Mana Guillotines and the 20 Mana Phantom Steps, his 560 Max Mana drained fast. He didn’t even bother turning Siphon Aura on, saving the 2 Mana per second drain since his Lifesteal was already over-capping his health.
When his mana hit 50, he pulled a top-tier potion from his belt, crushed the cork, and downed it without missing a swing.
The fight was a blur of extreme violence. Levi stayed permanently glued to Valdor’s blind spots. The titan thrashed, stomped, and swung, but it couldn’t catch the 176 Speed mosquito that was casually hacking off tens of thousands of health points a second.
The boss’s health plummeted. 2.0 Million. 1.8 Million. 1.5 Million.
The holographic timer in Levi’s vision ticked down to [3:00]. He was halfway through his Diamond buff, and the boss was still sitting on a massive chunk of health. Levi gritted his teeth, his real-world arms burning with exhaustion inside the haptic gear, and kept swinging. The math was tight, but he wasn’t going to lose the race.