VWUUSH!
The Skeleton Knight moved immediately after Constantine spoke.
There was no warmup at all!
The broadsword swept in a horizontal arc aimed at his waist, and he dropped into a sidestep just in time to feel the displaced air above him.
The blade's tip left a groove across the chamber wall.
He surfaced with both Ghost Fang Daggers and drove the right one into the joint beneath the Boss's kneecap while the opening was there. The blade skated off reinforced bone without leaving a mark.
He retreated and tried again—different angle, different joint. Three attempts, no response.
It wasn't technique.
The Ghost Fang Daggers' dark energy component had handled every Skeleton Knight on the floor above, reluctantly but measurably. Against the Boss, that same property didn't register. The Skeleton Knight's construction occupied a different tier—built specifically to render useless every approach that handled the enemies beneath it.
He accepted this and moved on.
Dark Blast was the only path to real damage, and the channel time was the problem. Half a second of standing still against a Boss with a four-meter reach required a specific window, which meant reading the rotation without burning too many Levels in the process.
Constantine circled the chamber's edge and kept his daggers making contact.
An opponent responding to active incoming aggression maintained its current approach longer than one given time to observe. He didn't need results from the melee. He just needed the Skeleton Knight operating on its existing rhythm while he mapped it.
Two horizontal sweeps. A heavy overhead. A brief reset.
Six exchanges to confirm it. The reset ran one beat longer than necessary—a gap the Boss had apparently never needed to close. He committed it to memory and tested it on the eighth cycle, stepping inside the overhead's arc to land two strikes against the arm joint during the window.
The backswing caught his shoulder on the way out.
—Level 24.
Even with clean execution, he was trading a Level for every serious attempt. He needed Dark Blast before the deficit became unmanageable.
The pulse came.
A low resonant vibration spread outward from the Boss's frame. Six points of pale cold light materialized at the chamber's edges and Skeleton Soldiers assembled from nothing, blades already raised.
The Skeleton Knight stepped back.
'Mob screen.' Constantine activated Ghost Step.
He vanished. The six soldiers swept their weapons through the air he'd been occupying and found nothing. He surfaced behind the nearest one and worked through the wave—joint strikes, quick and sequential, the same approach that had cleared the second floor's population for hours.
Standard Skeleton Soldiers weren't the concern here.
What he noticed partway through the first wave was that summon variants in Boss Rooms ran slightly more durable than their floor counterparts. A joint strike that would have been decisive upstairs needed a follow-up here. It cost him extra seconds per target, and when he wasn't in Ghost Step the soldiers oriented on him quickly—Boss Room summon mechanics apparently overrode normal faction logic, which meant his Undead classification gave him no leniency with them.
He finished the wave.
[You Have Leveled Up!]
Second summon came immediately. Six more soldiers, same reset. He cleared them the same way and surfaced from Ghost Step to find the Boss had shifted position during the fight—not dramatically, but the free space between them was measurably narrower.
It was mapping his emergence points.
Third wave: four soldiers, positioned differently. Two of them were covering the angles he'd been surfacing from. He killed them all, but it took longer, and the Skeleton Knight was three meters closer when the last one dropped.
It was adapting the same way the Dark Ghost Hellhound had on the floor above—watching and correcting, slowly closing off the space available to him.
He made his decision.
Both hands raised. Dark energy pooled cold and dense in his palms. The Skeleton Knight registered the motion and crossed the remaining distance at pace, broadsword angled to intercept the channel.
Constantine fired before it arrived.
The bolt struck the chest plate and the detonation shook the vaulted ceiling, raining dust across the chamber floor. A web of hairline fractures bloomed across the reinforced bone, spreading outward from the impact in every direction.
The Skeleton Knight took one full step backward.
It looked down at the damage.
Then at Constantine.
"So," it said. "It will be like that, then."
Constantine lowered his hands. The grin was already there.
First confirmed damage. Dark Blast was the key and Ghost Step was the delivery. If he kept the Boss from predicting where he surfaced, the loop was workable.
He reset his footing.
'Now we start.'
The dynamic changed after that first hit.
Before the Dark Blast landed, the Skeleton Knight had been managing the fight on the assumption that Constantine's primary threat was melee output. Everything it had done—the mob screens, the position adjustments, the tight rotation—was calibrated for an opponent who needed to get close to deal damage.
That assumption was now corrected.
The moment Constantine raised his hands again, the Boss moved—not on its usual rotation, but immediately and directly toward him, broadsword angled to intercept the channel before it completed.
He sidestepped and fired anyway. The bolt went wide, dissipating against the wall—too close, wrong angle. He broke away.
'It's intercepting the channel. Understood.'
The Skeleton Knight had identified the window between raising his hands and firing, and it was moving on that window specifically. He tried twice more from different positions around the chamber's edge and the Boss cut off both attempts before the charge completed.
He activated Ghost Step mid-retreat.
He moved laterally across the room in stealth and surfaced near the far wall at an angle he hadn't used before. The Skeleton Knight's head turned toward him as he emerged—faster than he'd expected—but not fast enough.
He fired.
The bolt caught the existing fracture network at a slight angle and the result was better than a clean surface impact would have been. A section of the chest plate cracked through, a fragment breaking loose and clattering across the chamber floor.
The Skeleton Knight staggered. Two full steps this time.
Constantine was already back in Ghost Step.
[You Have Leveled Up!]
The fight settled into that rhythm.
Surface, fire, vanish. Sometimes the bolt landed cleanly. Sometimes the Boss intercepted the channel and forced a redirect—a costly outcome that burned the Skill's cooldown without dealing damage. He lost Levels when the interceptions turned into actual hits and gained them back from the Dark Blasts that connected. Level 25 after a clean double hit. Back to 23 when he misread the Boss's reach and took a glancing impact from the broadsword flat. Level 24 as the next two bolts both connected without interruption.
The fracture network deepened with each hit.
What had started as a web of hairline cracks across the chest plate was becoming something structural. He could see it in the Boss's movement—the broadsword swings were marginally shorter in arc, the position adjustments fractionally slower. The Skeleton Knight's core integrity was declining.
Then the final summon came.
A pulse—weaker than the earlier ones—and eight Skeleton Soldiers materialized around the chamber. This wave moved differently from the previous ones. Instead of advancing to separate positions, they closed in a compressed formation, designed to crowd rather than flank.
Constantine activated Ghost Step and stepped out of the closing formation.
He didn't clear the wave.
He moved to his optimal angle and charged Dark Blast instead, directing everything toward the channel while the soldiers swept empty air behind him. Ghost Step expired at the exact moment the bolt fired.
It struck the deepest fracture site directly.
The detonation didn't just spread new damage—it collapsed the existing fracture network entirely. A section of the chest plate roughly the size of Constantine's torso simply ceased to exist, exposing the pale animating light of the Skeleton Knight's core to the open air of the chamber.
The Boss dropped to one knee.
The soldiers stood down without their summoner's direction. The broadsword lifted overhead with both hands, and the Skeleton Knight gathered the last of what remained for a single committed downward strike.
Constantine recognized it—this was the final window!