"We’re not cut out for this," he said.

It came out flat. Not dramatic. Just honest.

"We might not be," she said.

"I can’t land a clean hit. Every time I get close it flips everything I’m holding." He looked at his hand. "I can transform what it does to me on the way in, but I can’t transform what it does to my weapon once it’s already inside the technique." He paused. "I guess we can’t move like we hoped in an S-rank gate."

Silence.

Then, from behind them and slightly to the left:

"Disappointing."

They both turned.

A figure was leaning against the wall of the boss room with his arms folded.

Medium height. Unremarkable in the way that people who are very good at going unnoticed are unremarkable — not plain exactly, just... easy to not look at.

He had the expression of someone who had been watching a film and found the second act underwhelming.

Zeus stared at him.

"Where did you — how long have you —"

"Long enough," the figure said.

He unfolded his arms and tilted his head with mild interest.

"You two kept assuming this was a three-person raid. Every decision you made was built around the idea that the team ended at you." He gestured loosely at Zeus and then Sawn. "That’s not how teams work. That’s not even how math works."

"Who are you?" Sawn said.

The figure seemed vaguely pleased to be asked.

"I’m Shoba," he said. "And I think you need to consider the logic of what you just said. Rean got six dungeons in his playlist. Victor got ten. The system didn’t give everyone the same number. Teams aren’t equal. The size of a group isn’t fixed by assumption."

He looked at them evenly.

"So why would you assume you were only three?"

Zeus opened his mouth.

Closed it.

"What the hell," he said.

Shoba smiled.

It was a small, neat smile. Not unkind.

"Think of me," he said, "as your Xander."

He glanced at the Siegal, which had paused at the center of the room, watching the exchange through dim red slits.

"So. Have no fear."

The boss room felt different with four people in it.

Zeus wasn’t sure if that was real or just the adjustment of realizing he’d been counting wrong.

He looked at Sawn.

She was already timing the new variable, watching Shoba the way she watched everything — measuring intervals, calculating weight.

She met Zeus’s eyes and gave the smallest nod.

They weren’t three.

Shoba rolled his right shoulder once, like a man loosening up before something casual.

"I should explain first," he said, "because you’re going to have questions and I’d rather have you ask them later."

He didn’t look at the Siegal while he spoke. He looked at his own hand, turning it palm-up in the dim light of the boss room.

"I’ve been stealing from you."

Sawn’s expression didn’t change.

"Stealing."

"Mana," Shoba said. "It’s instinctive. I don’t switch it on — it’s just always happening. Everything in my vicinity loses a small fraction of its mana to me. Ambient drain. You two have been generating mana throughout this entire run, and some of it — not much, maybe two or three percent — has been going to me."

He paused.

"The boss, too."

Zeus stared at him.

"You’ve been stealing from the boss," he said.

"Since we entered," Shoba said. "So thank you. Genuinely. All of you have been very helpful."

He said it without irony, which was somehow worse. He said it like a man who had just finished a good meal.

"And what happens to what you steal?" Sawn asked.

"That’s the interesting part," Shoba said.

He closed his hand.

When he opened it, the stolen mana was visible — not in the way that most mana was visible, as a heat-shimmer or a faint discoloration of air, but as something more tactile. Compact. A small, dense mass sitting in his palm like a coal just pulled from a fire.

It was colorless for a second.

Then it flushed with something.

"The attribute it carries changes," he said. "I don’t control what it becomes. Stolen mana gets attributed randomly. It might be fire. It might be wind. It might be something rarer. I don’t know until it decides."

He looked at the mass in his palm.

"What I know is the amount. And I’ve been saving carefully."

He closed his hand again.

"I’ll deal with the knight," he said, almost as an aside.

He moved toward the corrupted summon standing over Kara’s body, and as he passed it he pressed two fingers to its shoulder and drained it.

The knight destabilized immediately — the binding dissolved, the green-sick lightning faded, and the construct collapsed into nothing.

Kara lay still, breathing.

Then Shoba turned to the Siegal.

He moved.

Zeus had seen fast hunters. Sawn was fast — faster than almost anyone he’d raided with, by the nature of her talent.

But this was something that stopped his mind for a full second, a raw speed that didn’t announce itself. One moment Shoba was at the room’s edge. The next he was halfway across it, and Zeus hadn’t caught the in-between.

Then he realized.

He looked at Sawn.

She was already engaged. Her eyes were forward, her hands slightly raised, and she was running calculations — he could see it in the way she breathed, the small adjustments of focus.

She had synced with Shoba without being asked. Without being introduced to his movement patterns. She had measured him in the thirty seconds he’d been speaking and she already had him.

The acceleration was hers.

Shoba reached the center of the chamber and hit the Siegal with his first stolen mana — he shouted the output as he did it, a habit or a system, a way of managing what he was working with.

"Eight percent!"

The mana discharged and the attribute resolved as fire. A burst of it, controlled but fierce, that hit the Siegal’s arm and burned. The boss staggered, reassigning the attribute on contact — but it was already consuming the energy, already using resources to manage the damage.

Shoba didn’t stop.

"Four percent!"

Wind. A blade of compressed air that opened a cut along the Siegal’s torso.

"Six percent!"

Metal. Dozens of fine shards, like needles, that peppered the Siegal’s surface.

"Three percent!"

Sand. A cloud of abrasive mana-sand that got into every joint and fissure.

"Two percent!"

Water. A pressurized jet that hit like a punch.

The Siegal was flailing. It reached for Shoba, tried to get its hands on him, tried to apply the Siegal talent — but Shoba was never where the reach landed.

Sawn’s acceleration kept him a half-step ahead of every grab, and she slowed the Siegal’s arms by fractions every time they extended, just enough to open the gap.

It looked effortless from across the room.

It was not effortless.

Sawn was burning through her reserves at a rate that put a fine tremble in her jaw.

But she did not stop.

Shoba was building to something. Zeus could feel it — the way you can feel the top of a slope approaching before you see it.

The stolen mana in reserve was denser now, heavier, the attribute unresolved. Whatever was coming had been accumulating.

Shoba paused for one beat.

He felt it. Whatever had been randomized was resolving into something that made him go still for the precise half-second it took to recognize what he had.

"Ninety-nine percent," he said.

His voice was different. Lower. Like a man who’d just picked up something very heavy and was being careful about it.

The mana discharged.

Time.

The talent hit the Siegal as a wave, visible — actually visible, like light through water — and the boss froze.

Not paralysis.

Something more fundamental.

The Siegal’s existence began to reverse. Its physical form compressed, contracted. The armored humanoid shape collapsed inward, pulling its mass back through time, shedding size and structure as the talent rewound the thread of what it had become.

It grew smaller.

And smaller.

And smaller.

Until what sat on the floor of the boss room was an egg.

Dark-shelled, slightly luminescent, pulsing faintly with the residual mana of what the Siegal had been. A dungeon boss, rewound to the beginning of itself. Reduced to potential.

Shoba turned to rush it.

He was fast. He was genuinely fast, talent-boosted and adrenaline-sharp and pointed directly at the thing.

He was not fast enough.

There was a sound — a small, precise one, like a single note of wind — and Sawn was already there.

She hadn’t run.

She had accelerated herself, the way she usually did, the way she saved for moments when she needed to be unmatchable, and she was crouched at the egg with her hand pressed to it and the mana output was clean and exact and the egg cracked and stilled and the light went out of it.

Boss cleared.

Shoba stood three feet from where it had been and looked at the space where it no longer was.

Sawn straightened up.

"That’s the least you could do," she said, brushing her hands together, "given how much mana you stole from me to get here. I aided you considerably."

She looked at him with something that was not quite a smile but adjacent to it.

"And look at you. Not a scratch. You know who’s responsible for that."

Shoba considered this.

"You," he said.

"Me," she confirmed.

Zeus walked across the room to where Kara was lying. He crouched beside her, checked the wound at her side — bad, but not fatal if they moved — and then looked up at the cracked shell of the Siegal’s egg and the two people standing over it.

"Seems we pass," he said.

He stood, lifted Kara carefully, and turned toward the gate.

"Now let’s go get her healed up."