"...."
The notification was still hovering in front of him when the first impact hit the Boss Room boundary.
[Achievement: Level Cap Reached]
{Select one: Advance Class / Change Race}
Constantine read it once, then snapped his attention to the door as a second impact came—harder, with clear intention behind it.
The enforcement layer that had kept the Adventurers outside during the Litch encounter had dissolved the moment the Boss fell, and the group on the other side had felt the change immediately.
Whatever technique the Rank 5 was applying to the boundary, it was working. The structural integrity of the entry seal was already showing visible degradation.
He forced his mind to work.
Change Race was the plan he had been building toward since the first floor.
A clean return to human—Level 1, fresh start, out of the dungeon with an identity that wasn't classified as a monster.
He had imagined it in quiet moments between fights for the past two weeks: a legitimate path forward with the possibility of existing in this world without hiding.
He had wanted it genuinely.
The plan died the moment he applied it to the room he was currently standing in.
A Level 1 human materializing from inside a cleared Litch chamber while a high-ranked investigation team was mid-breach wasn't a circumstance that invited conversation.
Three Adventurers had gone missing from this dungeon, and the people on the other side of that door were here specifically because of it.
Being found in this room, at Level 1, with dungeon loot and no registration documentation, would end the situation before he had the chance to explain anything—and he had no explanation that would have helped him anyway.
He closed the Change Race and moved to Advance Class.
Three options appeared.
[Death Warrior]
{An Undead of superior physical combat capability. Greatly increased strength and durability. Combat Skill acquisition rate enhanced.}
[Vampire]
{An Undead with command over the living. Greatly increased Charm-based and energy manipulation abilities. Can corrupt others through sustained contact.}
[Wraith]
{An Undead that has shed the physical form entirely. Capable of flight and phasing through solid matter. Detection resistance scales upward with Level.}
A third impact shook the frame and a crack split visibly across the enforcement layer's edge.
He read fast.
Death Warrior was a combat upgrade that left him standing on the ground and detectable, which solved nothing about the immediate problem.
Vampire offered energy manipulation that was powerful in the right context but kept him physical, and the Rank 5 outside had already demonstrated that staying physically detectable was its own category of risk.
Wraith was the only option with an exit route from a sealed chamber—flight and phasing through solid matter, with detection resistance on top of it.
He selected it.
[Class Change Initiated: Ghoul → Wraith]
{Warning: All externally acquired Skills will be lost during the transition. System-integrated Skills will be retained.}
He accepted before the warning had finished displaying.
The transition was nothing like the first one. Going from human to Ghoul had been a gradual dimming—sensation withdrawing in stages until what remained was a muted version of everything prior.
This was immediate and complete.
His physical form didn't fade; it disassembled at the foundational level, every anchored element releasing simultaneously, and for several seconds he existed as something between classifications—aware of the dungeon around him as pressure and density rather than solid geometry, perceiving the Adventurers through the door as concentrated heat in a cold field.
Then a new form assembled itself around him.
He looked at his hands first. Semi-translucent, with a faint luminescence drifting at the edges as though moved by a current he couldn't feel.
He pressed the right one against the chamber wall and felt nothing—no contact, no resistance. The hand passed through seamlessly.
The enforcement layer broke.
He turned to the loot scattered across the floor and opened Subspace. There was no time for identification or sorting.
He moved through the entire drop field in a single sweep—equipment, Skill Crystals, Gem pouches, everything that registered as foreign to the room's baseline—and pulled it all inside before sealing the pocket.
He had barely finished when the Boss Room door gave way completely.
He went up through the ceiling.
Three meters of solid stone absorbed him and he stopped, suspended inside the rock, perceiving the Adventurers below through the disturbance their presence made in the ambient energy of the floor. Six bodies. Four spreading outward through the chamber. Two holding the entrance.
"Empty." One of the Rank 4s, somewhere near the chamber's center.
"The loot is gone too," said another. "Boss was already cleared."
The silence that followed belonged to the Rank 5.
"I've lost it," he said, with the flat quality of someone who found this genuinely unusual. "Whatever cleared this room isn't here anymore."
Constantine held his position in the stone and didn't move.
The man had tracked a Ghoul through five floors of dungeon rock, cutting through Shadow Trace without visible effort. He was now standing beneath that same target with a few meters of stone between them and reading the room as empty. The Wraith's baseline presence suppression was already exceeding the Rank 5's tracking ceiling, and it would only widen as Level increased.
When the last energy signature withdrew toward the exit, Constantine drifted upward through the remaining rock and into the descent passage that led further into the dungeon.
The sixth floor opened beneath him in the dark, and he descended into it.