The sealed doors left no room for doubt: there was no retreat. All that remained was the boss, the circular chamber, and the stench of rotting flesh that seemed to intensify with every passing second.
Noah gripped his dagger and advanced.
The first strike was almost ceremonial, more of a probe than a real attack: he drove the blade into the monster’s forearm with all the strength he could muster.
The tip bounced off the grayish skin without penetrating more than a couple of millimeters.
“Seriously?” Noah muttered, leaping backward just in time to dodge the retaliating claw swipe. “Not even a decent scratch?”
[Your current strength isn’t enough to deal meaningful damage to a boss of this level. You need to level up, or find weak points. Or both. Or pray, if you prefer a less productive option.]
“Save the prayers for when I actually need them.”
The boss’s axe cut through the air right where his head had been half a second earlier. Noah felt the wind of the blade graze his cheek, close enough that he could make out the irregular teeth embedded in the metal.
“Alright,” he said, his voice a little higher-pitched than he would have liked to admit. “I’d much rather not die by that thing. I’m going to try to kill you before you touch me with it.”
He activated [Swift Step.]
The world slowed around him and Noah slid beneath the next axe swing, rolling between the monster’s thick legs, searching for an angle, any angle, that would do him some good.
His strength wasn’t enough. But his speed, combined with [Echo Thrust], was.
He lunged at the boss’s neck —the most exposed part, the only area without layers of protective fat— and drove the dagger in once.
The phantom echo struck the same spot a second and a half later.
A line of dark blood welled up from the wound.
Not much. But it was something.
“There it is!” Noah smiled, dodging another blow with a spin that barely saved him from losing an arm. “Repetition. I just need repetition.”
Strike. Dodge. Strike. Dodge. Over and over, always at the same spot on the neck, letting [Echo Thrust] do the heavy lifting his strength couldn’t.
The boss roared, more annoyed than wounded, but the blood kept falling, pooling into an ever-widening puddle beneath its hind legs.
Finally, after what felt like the tenth or eleventh cycle of strikes, the monster staggered and fell to its knees with a crash that shook the entire chamber.
Noah stepped back, panting, unable to hold back a smile.
“Maybe you weren’t such a big deal after all,” he said, wiping the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand.
But before he could move in to finish it off, something crossed his mind. Something important.
“Hey,” he said to his system, “about the bosses’ skills. Can I steal something from them if I kill them? Or does it only work if they’re the ones who kill me?”
[Bosses don’t grant skills upon defeat. Pilfered Hunter requires the target to be the one who causes your death. If the boss kills you, you steal one of its skills, at random. If you kill it first… you simply kill it.]
“Wait. Bosses have their own skills too?”
[Obviously. They use theirs to kill you. Or did you think that axe with teeth was just a fashion choice?]
Noah looked at the fallen axe beside the dying monster, its metal teeth still dripping, and swallowed hard.
He wasn’t the least bit thrilled about dying to that thing.
But if he really wanted to reach Rank SSS, if he really wanted a fighting chance —against higher bosses, against Hunters like Belle Snow, against whatever awaited him on floor 1000— he had to walk through this same hell as many times as it took.
He sheathed his dagger.
“Fine,” he said, standing in front of the fallen boss with his legs trembling, sweat soaking his clothes. “Finish the job. Kill me.”
The monster, as if it had been waiting for exactly that invitation, rose to its feet with a speed Noah hadn’t seen throughout the entire fight.
The axe came down in a vertical slash.
The pain arrived before his brain finished processing what was happening: his body split in two from shoulder to hip, and yet —cruelly, unfairly— he remained conscious.
“You missed, you idiot!” Noah shouted, through gurgles of blood filling his throat. “You were supposed to hit my head!”
The boss loomed over him, imposing, indifferent to the insult.
“I’m coming back,” Noah said, choking on his own blood, with a rage he didn’t know he could feel toward a creature with no language. “I’m coming back, and I’m going to make you pay for this!”
The monster took the conscious half of his body in its porcine hands and began to chew.
Noah’s screams filled the circular chamber until there was nothing left of him to scream with.
[You Died.]
[Activating passive skill: Return.]
[Random skill theft activated.]
[Analyzing… analyzing…]
[Skill stolen.]
◇◆◇
Noah woke up with a jolt, drenched in cold sweat, hands clutching at his own chest as if he needed to confirm he was still whole.
The heartbeat beneath his palm was chaotic, racing, almost painful.
“That one…” he murmured, his voice still shaking, “was the worst one yet.”
He didn’t need the system to confirm it. He knew it in his bones.
He opened the skills window anyway, looking for something that would make sense of all that suffering.
[Skill stolen: Devourer’s Hunger.]
[The bearer recovers part of their strength and gains resistances against the monster they consume.]
“Ah,” he said, understanding all at once. “That’s why it ate me. It wasn’t gratuitous cruelty. It was its own skill.”
He sat there for a moment, thinking, stroking his chin.
‘If every boss has a unique skill, and there are a thousand floors… that means there are, at minimum, a thousand different skills out there waiting for someone to die for them.’
He let out a short laugh, heavy with an irony he didn’t bother hiding.
‘I’m going to reach a point where I won’t even remember how many skills I have.’
He looked again at the description of [Devourer’s Hunger] and felt an anticipatory gag just imagining the activation method.
‘Eating those things. Great. Absolutely great. I’ll have to try different methods, I guess. I’m not going around devouring raw monster organs if I can avoid it.’
He checked the system. Level 2, same as it had been before he died. That, at least, held over.
“Brother?” Lily’s voice came from her room.
Noah got up immediately.
He found her lying down, the TV remote fallen beside the bed, out of her reach.
“Sorry,” she said, with that expression of someone who hates having to ask for help. “I didn’t want to bother you. I dropped the remote, and… I’ve also been hungry for a while now.”
Noah picked up the remote and handed it to her, sitting down for a moment on the edge of the bed.
“Hey,” he said gently. “It doesn’t matter what time it is. Call me whenever you need something. I’ll never be bothered by that.”
Lily smiled, relieved.
“Thanks, brother.”
“I’ll make breakfast for both of us,” Noah added, standing up.
“Can I ask for something specific?” his sister asked shyly.
“Of course. Whatever my empress wants.”
Lily laughed tenderly at those words. Before she could say anything else, Noah said:
“Just so you know, if we don’t have what you want, I’ll have to go buy it.”
“Hehe, I don’t want anything too complicated. I’d like a sweet breakfast, like pancakes drenched in honey, and coffee.”
Noah stroked his chin, looking up at the ceiling.
“I think we ran out of coffee two days ago… I’ll go check, and if there’s none I’ll have to go buy it first, okay?”
“Sure. Thanks, and, sorry too.”
“Don’t worry about it. I’ll always be your legs, little sister.”
Closing the door to Lily’s room, Noah walked down the hallway, thinking:
‘And today I should make quick progress. I already know how to beat the first floor’s boss. I don’t need to die to him again, so… I think today, I’ll go about the day normally.’
Just then, three sharp knocks sounded at the front door.
Noah sighed, already knowing exactly who it was.
Sure enough, the same man in the gray suit was waiting on the other side, with the same folder, the same professionally bored expression, and the same list of debts that he recited almost word for word: rent, medication, utilities. The same one-week deadline.
When the door closed again, Noah stood there staring at the papers in his hand.
“I can pay it all off in time,” he told himself. “I just need to level up and sell whatever I get in there.”
He checked his watch.
The curse would activate its countdown in two and a half hours.
“I need to hurry,” he murmured, tucking the papers away and heading straight for the kitchen. “Get everything ready for Lily before the crimson moon rises.”
After all, entering the Fortress was no longer a choice.
It never had been.
It was a death sentence obligation.
Just as he thought everything was ready to move on, Noah stopped dead.
“Wait… how did I forget about that?”
A woman. An SSS-Rank Hunter. Belle Snow, standing right in front of him, speaking to him in the corridor near the boss.
‘I can’t go about this day normally just yet. I might not run into Belle in that hallway again. The odds of having her right in front of me might have been razor-thin. And what if… I manage to steal a skill from her? An S-rank skill.’
He grumbled a little. He felt guilty about breaking promises to Lily, but he still hadn’t gotten used to the fact that, technically, he’d never promised her anything if he died and rewound time.
With a bit of guilt weighing on his heart, he ran out of the house, heading for the Fortress.
‘Damn it, I’m sorry, Lily, I really am. But Belle will pass by there any moment now, I need to find a way to get her to kill me!’