The bird did not stay down.

He had known, somewhere in the back of his mind trained by months of dungeon work, that a boss at this rank would not simply fold because one wing was compromised. What he had not anticipated was the way it chose to respond.

It did not stand. It did not charge.

It *split.*

The process was silent and deeply wrong in the way only dungeon phenomena could be — a visual fact that the brain refused to process cleanly on the first pass. The bird’s body shuddered once, the damaged wing folding inward, and then it came apart. Not violently. Not with sound or light or the theatrical energy of a skill being released. It simply became more of itself, each copy peeling away from the original like pages separating from a book, until the chamber floor was no longer occupied by one creature.

It was occupied by many.

Rean stopped counting at two hundred and the number was still climbing.

By the time the splitting ceased, they filled the chamber — perched on every surface, stacked in the air in loose formations, amber eyes all pointing the same direction. Toward him. The collective weight of their attention was a physical thing, a pressure against the chest.

The mana reading his vessel registered made no sense. Each bird carried the same signature as the original. Not a fraction. Not a division. The same.

A thousand birds. Each one an A rank boss.

"Okay," Rean said.

He moved.

---

The first few were simple enough. He came in fast on Untethered’s residual technique memory — not a full activation, he couldn’t afford that — just enough looseness in his movement to let him close angles that should have been impossible. The birds nearest to him reacted, which was the problem. Where one moved, the ones adjacent to it shifted too, a ripple of collective awareness that made isolating targets complicated.

He killed the first with a clean pulse to the skull. It dropped.

The second he took with a blade draw across the throat mid-dive. It crumpled against the floor.

The third, fourth, fifth — he worked methodically, keeping his breathing controlled, managing the mana expenditure per kill with the kind of tight arithmetic that became instinct after enough close calls. Each one cost something. Each one fell.

And each one was immediately replaced in his awareness by nine more.

He understood the problem within the first two minutes. Not the tactical problem — he had understood that before the first kill. The mathematical one. At this pace, burning this much per engagement, he would run his reserves dry somewhere around the three-hundredth bird. If his estimate of the total population was even approximately correct, that meant he would be fighting the remaining seven hundred on fumes, in a chamber full of A rank creatures with fully intact mana signatures.

He had been in bad situations before.

This was a different category of bad.

---

He pulled back to the centre of the chamber and spent four seconds thinking while three birds dove at him and he sidestepped each one on reflex.

Packs.

The birds moved in loose formations when they attacked — he’d noticed it without flagging it consciously, the way the mind logs patterns before the conscious mind catches up. They weren’t coordinated in the way a trained unit would be, but they clustered naturally, the way birds did, drafting off each other’s movement. Which meant if he could find the right tool, the right angle of attack, he could stop spending one kill’s worth of mana per kill.

He reached for Thunder Stream.

---

**[Thunder Stream]** — *An Assimilated technique, absorbed during the Tower Raid from a creature of the upper floors whose classification remains unlogged. In its base form, Thunder Stream compresses the user’s velocity to its theoretical maximum for a single continuous second — movement that approaches the speed of light in a sustained burst, during which the user’s physical presence generates an electrical discharge proportional to speed. Contact during activation causes catastrophic kinetic and electrical damage to anything in the user’s path. Duration: one second. Recovery window: variable depending on vessel architecture.*

*Evolved variant — Rean’s assimilation produced an instinctive refinement not present in the original technique. Where the base form fires in a single vector, the evolved version allows for mid-burst directional adjustment, permitting the user to carve a path rather than simply fire in a line. This distinction, while appearing minor, increases practical kill coverage by several orders of magnitude.*

---

He activated it.

The world went white.

One second is nothing. One second is also, at that velocity, an almost incomprehensible distance. He felt the chamber rather than saw it — a map of warm bodies and mana signatures that his vessel processed faster than his eyes could send data, and he moved through them the way current moves through water, finding the path of least resistance that still passed through the most targets. 𝐟𝕣𝗲𝕖𝕨𝗲𝐛𝗻𝗼𝐯𝗲𝚕.𝗰𝚘𝐦

The electrical discharge did the work. He didn’t even need direct contact with most of them — proximity at that speed was enough, the discharge arcing through the packed formation clusters like it was threading a needle, and the birds in those clusters came apart in sequences of concussive light.

Then the second ended.

He came to rest against the far wall, one hand braced against stone, breathing harder than he had intended. His vessel hummed with the residual charge — it always did after Thunder Stream, a full-body vibration that took a moment to settle.

He turned.

The chamber had significantly fewer birds in it.

A thought surfaced, unbidden. The creature he had Assimilated Thunder Stream from — a floor guardian, dense with accumulated techniques, fast enough that the first encounter had nearly ended the raid before it started. That creature had used the base form. A single vector, straight and devastating, but straight.

If it had known the evolved form, the directional adjustment, the ability to carve and arc and sweep—

Rean let the thought go. Luck of the Assimilation. He had never fully understood why some absorptions came refined while others came raw. He had stopped questioning it and started being grateful.

He activated Thunder Stream twice more in the following three minutes, each burst carving through the remaining clusters with the same violent efficiency. The chamber count dropped. Fifty. Thirty. Fifteen.

He had started breathing more easily.

---

Then the remaining fifteen stopped.

Not retreated. Not scattered. They landed, each one settling onto the chamber floor in a loose circle, and then they began to move toward each other with that same wrong silence the original splitting had carried. Bodies met bodies without collision, overlapping in a way that physics did not normally permit, and the mana signatures — fifteen individual A rank readings — did not add together.

They merged.

And the reading on the other side of the merge was exactly what it had been at the start. Not fifteen times stronger. Not depleted. Not recombined into something diminished.

The same.

One bird. Intact. The damaged wing from the initial pulse — healed. The bronze feathers his clone had cut — restored. It regarded him from across the chamber as though the last several minutes had been a minor inconvenience.

Rean stood very still.

He ran the logic slowly, because running it fast produced an answer he didn’t want to accept and he needed to be sure.

*Each bird carried the full signature.* Not a shard of the original’s power, not a fraction — the complete reading. Which meant the splitting was not division. It was something closer to duplication of a state. Each copy was the boss in full. And when they merged back together, they weren’t pooling reduced remnants — they were collapsing redundant instances back into the singular original.

The fifteen he had left alive were enough to reconstitute the whole.

The nine hundred and eighty-five he had killed meant nothing.

He felt the weight of that settle across his shoulders like something physical. He thought about the mana he had spent. He thought about Thunder Stream’s recovery window and how many activations he had left before the technique locked itself out for the rest of the fight. He thought about the pulse he had used to open the engagement, the Multiman activation, the Untethered burns.

*Were all my skills insignificant.*

Not a question, the way it landed in his mind. Flat. Factual. The kind of thought that arrived when exhaustion started touching the edges of confidence.

He looked at the bird.

It opened its wings — fully, both of them, the damaged joint gone as though it had never happened — and the wingspan swallowed the far end of the chamber.

Rean closed his eyes for two seconds.

When he opened them, the arithmetic had rearranged itself into something usable. Not comfortable. Not reassuring. But usable.

The problem was not that his skills were insufficient. The problem was sequencing. He had been solving for reduction when the only solution that registered was completion. The birds did not die permanently in parts. They had to die in whole — every instance, every copy, every fragment of the original state, gone simultaneously. Leave even one alive and the system reset.

Which meant he needed a single attack that could cover the entire chamber at once.

Which meant he needed to let them split again.

All of them. Every copy. Fill the room.

And then he needed to find a way to put Thunder Stream through all of them at the same time.

He exhaled slowly.

"Alright," Rean said.

His hands began to move.